1922 - Nonsenseorship (Prohibition Satire & Ridicule)

I
$&&$.&$ 8.$
NONSENSEORSHIP
HEYWOOD BROUN
GEORGE S.CHAPPELL RUTH HALE BEN HECHT WALLACE 1RWIX ROBERT KEABLE HELEN BULLITT LOWRY and tfie AUTHOR of "THE
Edited by
FREDERICK OBKIEN DOROTHY R\RKER FRANK SWINNERTON
HANSON TOWNE V. A. WEAVER 'ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

HARLES
JOHN
P.
RRORS of WASHINGTON*
G.
P.
CONCERNING I PROHIBITIONS INHIBITIONS^ AND ILLEGALITIES

Illustrated by RALPH BARTON
SUNDRY ^y OBSERVATIONS
G.P.
PUTNAAV'S SONS
Ulnickcrbocker IPrcss
JfEW YORK AND LONDON
1922
Copyright, 1922
by
G. P. Putnam's Sons
Made
in the
United
Stater, of
America
p\
v,a
5oHt
WE HAVE WITH
AT
US TODAY
current bootliquor quotations, Haig & Haig costs twelve dollars a quart, while any dependable
booklegger can unearth a copy of "Jurgen" for about fifteen dollars. Which indicates, at least, an
economic application of Nonsenseorship.

Its
literary,
social,
and
ethical
reactions
are
rather
more
involved.
To
define
them somewhat
we
set
invited a
group of not-too-serious thinkers to
down
their views regarding nonsenseor ships in
general and any pet prohibitions in particular. In introducing those whose gems of protest are
to be found in the setting of this volume, it is but sportsmanlike to state at the start that admission
was offered
clivity.
none of notable puritanical proThe prohibitionists and censors are not

to
represented.
They
this,
require, in a levititious literary
escapade like
already
is
no spokesman. Their viewpoint amply set forth. Moreover, likely they

. . .
would not be amusing.
Also, the exponents of Nonsenseorship are victorious; and at least the

iii
NONSENSEORSHIP
agonized cries of the vanquished, their cynical comment or outraged protest, should be given opportunity for expression! Not that we consider
cynical, or outraged.
HEYWOOD BROUN agonized,
Indeed, masquerading as a stalwart foe of inhibitions, he starts right out, at the
very head of the parade, with a vehement advocacy

of prohibition. His plea (surely, in this setting, traitorous) is to prohibit liquor to all who are over declares that "rum was thirty years of age!
He
designed for youthful days and fluence which made oats wild."
is
the animating inthirty, pre-
After
sumably, Quaker
Oats.
we have quite brushed by GEORGE S. CHAPPELL who serves a tasty appetizer at the very
at that
And
threshold, a bubbling cocktail of verse defining the authentic story of censorious gloom.
Censorship seems a species of spiritual flagellation to BEN HECHT, who, as he says, "ten years ago
prided himself upon being as indigestible a type of the incoherent young as the land afforded." And
nonsenseorship in general he regards as a war-born Frankenstein, a frenzied virtue grown hugely
luminous; "a snowball rolling uphill toward God and gathering furious dimensions, it has escaped
the shrewd janitors of orthodoxy who from age to age were able to keep it within bounds."
iv
NONSENSEORSHIP
Then RUTH HALE, who
visualizes
glowing op-
portunities for feminine achievement in the functionings of inhibited society. "If the world outside
the
home
is
to
become as circumscribed and paterit,
nalized as the world inside
obviously
all
the ad-
vantage
lies
with those
who have been
living
under
nonsenseorship long enough to have learned to
manage it."
WALLACE IRWIN is irrepressibly jocose (perhaps because he sailed for unprohibited England the
day
manuscript was delivered), breaking into quite undisciplined verse anent the rosiness of life
his
since the red light laws
went
blue.
not sure, as I write, that this article ever will be printed," says ROBERT KEABLE, the English
"I
am
Mr. Keable, a minister from Africa, wrote of the war as he saw it in France, and in a way which offended
(It is).
author of "Simon Called Peter."
people with mental blinders.
He
declares that the
war quite completely knocked humbug on the head and bashed shams irreparably. "Rebels," says he, meaning those who speak their mind and write of things as they see them, "must be drowned in a
babble of words."
And then HELEN BULLITT LOWRY, the exponent

of the cocktailored young lady of today, averring that to the pocket-flask, that milepost between the
NONSENSEORSHIP
time that was and the time that
is,
we owe the
single
standard of drinking.
She maintains that the
debutantalizing flapper, now driven right out in the open by the reformers, is the real salvation of our
mid-victrolian society.
palpitating defense of censorship would be expected from FREDERICK O'BRIEN of the South
No
who contributes (and deliciously defines) a precious new word to the vocabulary of Nonsenseorship, "Wowzer." The nature of a wowzer is
Seas,
hinted in a ditty sung by certain uninhibited individuals as they lolled and imbibed among the
mystic atolls and white shadows "Whack

the cymbal!
Bang
the
drum!
Votaries of Bacchus!
Let the popping corks resound, Pass the flowing goblet round! May no mournful voice be found, Though wowzers do attack us !"
DOROTHY PARKER
Hymn
gives vent to a poignant of Hate, anent reformers, who "think every-
thing but the Passion Play was written by
Avery
Hop wood," and whose dominant desire is to purge the sin from Cinema even though they die in the
effort.
"I hope to
God
they do," adds the author
devoutly.
From England,
through the eyes of

vi
FRANK
NONSENSEORSHIP
SWINNERTON, we glimpse
us,
ourselves as others see
and rather
pathetically.
In days gone by, lured
by reports of America's lawless free-and-easiness, Swinnerton says he craved to visit us. But no more. The wish is dead. We have become hopelessly moral and uninviting. "I see that I shall after all have to live quietly in England with my pipe and
my
my
like to visit
And yet I should has suddenly become in imagining an enormous country of 'Don't!' and
abstemious bottle of beer.
America, for
it
know what it is like to have by somebody who is not a woman."

I want to
'Don't' said
Also
is
raised
the British
voice
of
H. M.
TOMLINSON, singed with satire. He writes as from a palely pure tomorrow when mankind shall have
reached such a state of complete uniformity of soul, mind and body, that "only a particular inquiry will
determine a
man from a woman, though

from a man."
is
it
may
fail
to determine a fool
Tomlinson's
imagined nation of the future

geneous, as contented,
"as loyal and homoas stable, as a reef of
actinozoal plasm." And over each hearth hangs the sacred Symbol a portrait of a sheep. Next is the usually jovial face of CHARLES
HANSON TOWNE
thousand quips) struggle with Prohibition, dourly surveying

vii
(that face which has launched a now all stern in his unbattled
this
NONSENSEORSHIP
"land of the spree and
home
"My children,"
wine and beer
.
says
.
Towne,
."
of the grave." . . "as they sip their light

.
He
is,
at least,
an optimist!
But
then,
his
In
we are reminded he is also a bachelor. own American language JOHN WEAVER
when
pictures the feelings of an old-time saloon habitue his former friend the barkeep, now rich from
bootlegging, with a home "on the Drive" and all that, declares his socially-climbing daughter quite too good for this particular "Old Soak's" son.
Weaver's retrospect of
"Bill's
Place" will bring
damp
eyes to the unregenerate:
"So neat!
And
over at the free-lunch counter,
Charlie the coon with a apron white like chalk, Dishin' out hot-dogs, and them Boston Beans,
And Sad'dy
Or
night a great big hot roast ham, roast beef simply yellin' to be et,
And washed down
with a seidel of Old Schlitz
!"
"The Puritans disliked the theatre because it was It was a place where people went in dejolly. liberate quest of enjoyment." So says ALEXANDER
WOOLLCOTT, who emerges

of censorship.
as a sort of economic
all
champion of stage morality, though no friend at

Despite the
mot "nothing risque Woollcott emphatically declares nothing gained," the bed-ridden play is not, as a general thing, successful.
"A
blush
is
not, of course, a
viii
bad sign
in
NONSENSEORSHIP
the box-office," says he, developing his theme, "but the chuckle of recognition is better. So is the glow
the tear of sympathy. The smutty and the scandalous are less valuable than homely humor, melodramatic excitement or pretty
of sentiment, so
is
sentiment."
and alphabeted company the anonymous AUTHOR or "THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON'"' who views the applications of nonsenseorship from the standpoint of national
last in this variegated
politics.
And
G. P. P.
ix
CONTENTS
PAGE
We Have With Us Today

Evolution
iii
G. P. P.
Another of Those Outlines
....
-
GEORGE
Nonsenseorship
S.
CHAPPELL
.
HEYWOOD BROUN
Literature
and the Bastinado
17
BEN HECHT
The Woman's
Place
33
RUTH HALE
Owed
to Volstead
45
WALLACE IRWIN
The Censorship
of
Thought
53
ROBERT KEABLE
The Uninhibited Flapper
69
HELEN BULLITT LOWRY

The Wowzer
Reformers
in the
South Seas
83
FREDERICK O'BRIEN
:
A Hymn of Hate
DOROTHY PARKER
.
95
Prohibition
99
FRANK SWINNERTON
Guess at Unwritten History
H. M. TOMLINSON
xi
113
CONTENTS
PAGE
In Vino Demi-Tasse
131
CHARLES HANSON TOWNE

Bootleg
143
JOHN V. A. WEAVER
And
The
the Play wright
148
ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
Oracle That Always Says
"No"
....
166
THE AUTHOR OF "THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON"
xu
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
George Chappell demonstrating Censorship
S.
his
Outline of 3
Heywood Broun
of Folly
finds
America suffering from a dearth

5
Ben Hecht chopping away at the ever-forgiving and all-condoning Bugaboo of Puritanism Ruth Hale as a XXth Century woman guarding the Home Brew
...
17
33
45
Wallace Irwin composing under the influence of synthetic gin and Andrew Volstead
....
Robert Keable urging the Automaton called Citizen to turn on his oppressor
Helen Bullitt Lowry watching Puritanism set the
Flapper free
Frederick O'Brien finds the South Seas purified and beautified by the Missionaries
53
69
83 95
Dorothy Parker hating Reformers
Frank Swinnerton contemplating, from the Tight Little Isle, the two classes of prigs developed by Prohibition; those who accept it and those who rebel
.
99
H. M. Tomlinson regarding, with not too great enthusiasm, the Perfect State of the Future
Charles Hanson
Towne and
the
Law
John V. A. Weaver noticing the bartender who has been thrown out of work by Prohibition
Alexander Woollcott rescuing the Playwright from the awful shears of the Censor
.... ....
...
113
131
143 148
The
Periscope of the Author of the Mirrors of Washingington is turned toward the Great NegativeOracle
xiii
166
NONSENSEORSHIP
GEORGE
S.
CHAPPELL DEMONSTRATING HIS OUTLINE OF CENSORSHIP
EVOLUTION
Another of Those Outlines
BY GEORGE
S.
CHAPPELL
Time.
The
Beginning.
When Adam sat with lovely Eve And pressed his primal suit,
There was a ban, if we believe Our Genesis, on fruit.
But
did
it
give old
Adam
pause,
This
One and
only law there was?
X
Nine
verses are
And then
Of
His
supposed
to elapse.
great Moses, on the crest Sinai, did devise
tablets, acting for the best,
(Though some thought otherwise)
At least he showed
Man's
sins
3
restraint, for
then
were limited to Ten.
NONSENSEORSHIP
C
Ninety-nine
In
later
days the
Romans proud
And lots of things were not By just Justinian.
Their famous Code began. allowed
He wrote a list,
stupendous long;
of
"One Hundred Ways Wrong."
Going
M
Nine hundred
nety-nine verses elapse.
Napoleon, (see Wells's book)
Improved the Roman plan
By
spotting a potential crook In every fellow-man.
And
by the Thousand
jail, until
off
they went
To
proved innocent.
MDCCCCXXII
Nine
nine hundred
Now in the change-about complete Since Adam passed from view.

For apples we
and
ninety-nine verses elapse.
And a11
are urged to eat
else 1S
tab
-i
'
Million laws hold us in
thrall,
all!
And we
serenely break them
HEYWOOD BROUN FINDS AMERICA SUFFERING FROM
DEARTH OF FOLLY
NONSENSEORSHIP
HEYWOOD BROUN
CENSOR
is
man who
has read about Joshua

believes that he
and forgotten Canute.
He
can
hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised right hand. For after all it is life with
which he quarrels. Censorship is seldom greatly concerned with truth. Propriety is its worry and
obviously impropriety was allowed to creep into the fundamental scheme of creation. It is perhaps a
unfortunate that no right-minded censor was present during the first week in which the world
little
was made.
The plan
of sex, for instance, could
have been suppressed effectively then and Mr. Stunner might have been spared the dreadful and
dangerous ordeal of reading "Jurgen" so

centuries later.
many
there had only been right-minded supervision over the modelling of Adam and Eve the world could worry along nicely without the aid
Indeed,
if
of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.

5
Sup-
NONSENSEORSHIP
pression of those, biological facts which the Society includes in its definition of Vice is now impossible.
what the good men are after. Somewhat after the manner of the Babes in the Woods they would cover us over with leaves. For men and women they have figs and for babies they
Concealment
is
really
have cabbages. It must have been a censor who

the notion that
upon what you don't know won't hurt
first hit
you.
We doubt whether
Eve
left
to sex.
Eden
a rule which applies and took upon herself a

it is
curse for the sake of knowledge. It seems a little heedless of this heroism to advocate that we keep the curse and forget the knowledge. The battle
against censorship should have ended at the moment of the eating of the apple. At that moment Man committed himself to the decision that he
would know
it.
life even though he died for under the terms of the existUnfortunately, ence of mortals one decision is not enough.
all
about
We
must keep reaffirming decisions if they are to hold. Even in Eden there was the germ of a new threat to degrade Adam and Eve back to innocence. When they ate the apple an amoeba in a distant corner of the Garden shuddered and began the long
and
difficult
process of evolution.
S.
To
all practical
purposes
John
Sunnier was
6
already
born.
NONSENSEORSHIP
To
If
its
us the whole theory of censorship is immoral. functions were administered by the wisest
man
in the
world
it
would
course the wisest
man
be wrong. But of in the world would have too

still
much
sense to be a censor.
We
are not dealing
with him.
His
substitutes are distinctly lesser folk.
They are not even trained for their work except in the most haphazard manner. Obviously a censor
should be the most profound of psychologists. Instead the important posts in the agencies of sup-
number
pression go to the boy who can capture the largest of smutty post cards. After he has con-
fiscated a
few gross he
art.
is
promoted to the task of
watching over
thoroughly blasted
By that time he has been pretty for the sins of the people. An
extraordinary number of things admit of shameful interpretations in his mind.
For
clothes
instance, the sight of a

is
woman making baby
not generally considered a vicious spectacle in many communities, but it may not be shown
Pennsylvania by order of the state board of censors. In New York Kipling's Anne
in
on the screen
of Austria was not allowed to "take the
wage
of
infamy and eat the bread of shame"

sion of
in a screen ver-
"The Ballad of
Fisher's
Boarding House."
Thereby a most immoral effect was created. Anne was shown wandering about quite casually and
7
NONSENSEORSHIP
drinking and conversing with sailors who were perfect strangers to her, but the censors would not
allow any stigma to be placed
upon her conduct.
seems to support the rather strange theory that deeds don't matter so long as nothing is said about them. The New York picture board is peculiarly sensithis decision
Indeed
tive to words.
one occasion a picture was submitted with the caption, "The air of the South Seas breathes an erotic perfume." "Cut out
Upon
came back the command of the censors. In Illinois, Charlie Chaplin was not allowed to have a scene in "The Kid" in which upon being asked the name of the child he shook his head and
'erotic,'
"
rushed into the house, returning a moment later to answer, "Bill." That particular board of censors seemed intent upon keeping secret the fact that
there are two sexes.
Of course,
it
may be argued
it
are not an art and that
that motion pictures makes little difference
what happens to them.

difference.
We
cannot share that
in-
Enough has been done in pictures to convince us that very beautiful things might be
achieved
if
way.
Not
is
only the censors could be put out of the all the silliness of the modern American
the fault of the producers. Much of the blame must rest with the various boards of censorpicture
NONSENSEORSHIP
ship.
It
is
difficult to
think
up many
stories in
which there is no passion, crime, or birth. As a matter of fact, we are of the opinion that
the entire theory of motion picture censorship is mistaken. The guardians of morals hold that if the
robbing a safe he will thereby be moved to want to rob a safe himself. In rebuttal we offer the testimony of a gentleman
spectator sees a picture of a
man
much
wiser in the knowledge of
human conduct
than any censor. Writing in "The New Republic," George Bernard Shaw advocated that hereafter
public reading-rooms supply their patrons only
with books about
evil characters.
For, he argued,
after reading about evil deeds our longings for wickedness are satisfied vicariously. On the other
hand there
the danger that the public may read about saints and heroes and drain off its aspirations
is
in such directions without actions.
We believe this
is
true.
We once
saw a picture
about a highwayman (that was in the days before

censorship was as strict as it is now) and it convinced us that the profession would not suit us.
We
had not realized the amount of compulsory
riding entailed.
The particular highwayman whom

hurriedly, slept infrequently, and his boots on. Mostly he was being
It left us sore
we saw dined
invariably had
pursued and hurdling over hedges. 9
NONSENSEORSHIP
in every
muscle to watch him.
At
the end of the
eighth reel every bit of longing in our soul to be a swashbuckler had abated. The man in the picture had done the adventuring for us and we could re-
turn in comfort to a peaceful existence. Florid literature is the compensation for hum-
drummery. If we are ever completely shut off from a chance to see or read about a little evil-doing we shall probably be moved to go out and cut loose on our own. So far we have not felt the necessity. We have been willing to let D'Artagnan do it. Even so arduous an abstinence as prohibition
may
tutes.
be
made endurable through fictional substiAfter listening to a drinking chorus in a
comic opera and watching the amusing antics of the chief comedian who is ever so inebriated we are
almost persuaded to stay dry. Prohibition is perhaps the climax of censorship. It has the advantage over other forms of suppression in that at least it represents a sensible point of view. Yet, we are
not converted.
There are things

sense.
officials
in the
world far
more important than hard
One
of the
of the Anti-Saloon
League
gave out a statement the other day in which he endeavored to show all the benefits provided by But he did it with figures. There prohibition.
was a column showing the increase of accounts

10
in
NONSENSEOHSHIP
of inmates in hospitals, jails
savings banks and another devoted to the decrease and almshouses. From
a utilitarian point of view the figures, if correct, could hardly fail to be impressive, but little has
been said by either side about the spiritual aspects of rum. Unfortunately there are no statistics on
that,
and yet
it is
the one phase of the question
which interests
us.
to observe a letter
Some weeks ago we happened from a man who wrote to one of
the newspapers protesting against the proposed settlement in Ireland on the ground that, "It's so
damned
sensible."
We
have somewhat the same
feeling about prohibition. It is a movement to take the folly out of our national life and there is no
quality which
America needs
so sorely.
If enforcement ever becomes perfect this will be
a nation composed entirely of men who wear rubbers, put money in the bank, and go to bed at ten. That fine old ringing phrase, "This is on me," will
be gone from the language.
Conversation will be
years the last genthat
wholly instructive, for in

eration capable of saying,
?" will
fifty
"Do you remember
night
have been gathered to its fathers. Of course, there is no denying the shortsightedness of the forces of rum. They cannot escape their
responsibility for having aided in the advent of
Prohibition.
They; were slow to see the necessity

11
NONSENSEORSHIP
of some form of curtailment and limitation of the
traffic.
Such moves
as they did
instance,
wrong-headed.
For
make were entirely we had ordinances
providing for the early closing of cafes. Instead of that we should have had laws forbidding any-
body to sell liquor except between the hours of 8 P.M. and 5 A.M. Daytime drinking was always
sodden, but something
is
necessary to
make
night
worth while.
Man
is
more than the
beasts,
and he
should not be driven into dull slumber just because the sun has set.
invention of electricity, liquor, cut glass mirrors, and cards made man the master of his en-
The
vironment rather than

is
its slave.
Now
that liquor
the other factors are mockery. Card playing has become merely an extension of the cruel and logical process of the survival of the
gone
all
fittest.
The
fellow with the best hand wins, in-
stead of the one with the best head.
Nobody draws
four cards any more or stands for a raise on an inside straight.

scientific
The
thing
is
just cut-throat and
and wholly mercenary.

gone. Nobody cares to come in to a for the purchase of mineral water
The kitty is common fund
and cheese sandwiches. And with the passing of the kitty the most promising development of cooperation and communism in America has gone.
12
NONSENSEORSHIP
It was prophetic of a more perfectly organized society. In the days of the kitty the fine Socialistic
ideal of, "From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs," was made specific and workable. And the inspiring romantic tradition
of Robin
life.
Hood was
also carried over into
modern
left the
The
kitty robbed only the rich
and
poor alone.
of us will contribute* unquestionably to the material comfort of others. Each must keep his money for the savings bank.
But now none
Perhaps, something of the old friendly rivalry may be revived. In a hundred years it may be that
men
meet around a table and that one to the other, "What have you got?"
will
will say
"I've got $9,876.32 in first mortgages and gilt-
edged
securities."
"That's good.
You
win."
we doubt it. Another mistake which was made

or other
But somehow
in the policy
of compromising with the drys was the agreement

that liquor should not be served to minors. On the contrary, the provision should have been that drink
ought not to be permitted to any man more than thirty years of age. Liquor was never meant to be a steady companion. It was the animating influence which
made
oats wild.
13
Work
and responsi-
NONSENSEORSHIP
Rum bility are the portion of the mature man. was designed for youthful days when the reckless avidity for experience is so great that reality must
be blurred a
little lest it
blind us.
happened to pick up a copy of "The Harvard Crimson" the other day and read: "The first freshman smoker will be held at 7.45 o'clock
this
We
evening in the living room of the Union.
P.
H. Theopold,
'25,
Chairman of the Smoker
Committee, will act as Chairman, introducing Clark Hodder, '25, and J. H. Child, '25, the Class
President and Secretary respectively. After the speeches there will be a motion picture, and some
vaudeville
crackers,
by a magician from Keith's. Ginger ale, and cigarettes will be served. All freshto be called
men
and
are invited to attend."
They used
in those
Freshmen Beer Nights
days the possibility of friendship at feel sure that it first sight was not fantastic. cannot be done on ginger ale. The urge for
We
democracy does not dwell
in
any
soft drink.
The
speeches will be terrible, for there will be no pleasant interruptions of "Aw, sit down," from the
man
in the
back of the room.
If somebody begins
to sing, "P. H. Theopold is a good old soul," it is not likely to carry conviction. Not once during the evening will any speaker confine himself to saying.
14
NONSENSEORSHIP
falling off the table. Probably the magician will not be able to find anything in the high hat except white rabbits.
"To Hell with Yale!" and
Although we have seen no first hand report of that freshman smoker, we feel sure that it was only a crowded self-conscious gathering of a number of young men who said little and went home early.
the standpoint of the strictest of abstainers there must be some regret for the passing
Even from
through the bad old days does not remember the thrill of rectitude which came to him the first time he said, "Make mine a
of ruin.
lived
What man who
cigar."
Though they have taken away our rum from us we have our memories. Not all the days have been dull gray. Back in the early pages of our diary is the entry about the trip which we made to Boston
with William
in the hard winter of 1907.
It was agreed that neither of us should drink the Staunch William same sort of drink twice.
we topped him with twenty-four. Upon examination we observe that the entry in the memory book was made several days later. The handwriting is a little shaky. But for that adventure we might have lived and died
achieved nineteen varieties, but
entirely ignorant of the nature of
an Angel Float. In those days human sympathy was wider.

15
NONSENSEORSHIP
F. M.
street
W. seemed in many respects a matter-of-fact

was he who chanced upon the 59th Circle just before dawn and paused to call
it
man, but
the attention of all bystanders to the statue of
Columbus.
"Look at him," he
to Spain in chains."
said.
"Christopher Columbus !
He discovered America and then they sent him back
He wept,
and we
realized for the first time that
under a rough exterior there beat a heart of gold.
16
BEN HECHT CHOPPSNG AWAY AT THE EVER-FORGIVING AND ALL-CONDONING BUGABOO OF PURITANISM
LITERATURE AND THE BASTINADO

BEN HECHT
SURVEYING the trend
of
modern
literature
one
must, unless one's mental processes be complicated with opaque prejudices, wonder at the provoking
laxity of the national censorship. I write viewpoint of an aggrieved iconoclast.
from the
It becomes yearly
elected,
more obvious that the duly commissioned and delegated high priests of
the nation's morale are growing blind to the dangers which assail them. If not, then how does it
come that such enemies of the public weal as H. L. Mencken, Floyd Dell, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Dos Passes, Mr. Cabell, Mr. Rascoe, Mr. Sandburg, Mr. Sinclair Lewis are not in jail? How does it come Professor Frinck of Cornell is not in jail? Bodenheim, Margaret Anderson, Mr. John Weaver are not in jail.
Were I the President of the United States sworn

to uphold the dignity of its psychopathic repressions, pledged on a stack of Bibles to promote the
relentless pursuit
and annihilation of other people's

17
NONSENSEORSHIP
happiness, I would have begun
my
reign by clap-
ping H. L. Mencken
Cabell, I
into irons forthwith.
would have sent to Russia. Anderson I would have boiled in oil. But what is the situation? Observe these gentlemen and their kin enjoying not only their bodily
liberty but allowed to prosper
Mr. Sherwood
on the
royalties de-
volumes designed to destroy the principles upon which the integrity

rived
sale of incendiary
from the
of the commonwealth depends. The spectacle is one aggravating to an iconoclast. There is no

affront as distressing as the tolerance of one's enemies.
Mr. H. L. Mencken is, perhaps, the outstanding victim of this depravity of indifference which more and more characterizes the enemy. Mr. Mencken,
hurling himself for ten years against the Bugaboo of Puritanism a fearless and wonderfully capari-
soned Knight of Alarums, Prince of Darkness, Evangel of Chaos Mr. Mencken pauses for a mo-
ment out of breath casting about slyly for fresher and deadlier weapons and lo! the Bugaboo with a gentle smile reaches out and embraces him and
plants the kiss of love on both his cheeks, strokes his hair wistfully, and invites him to sit on the front
porch. Alas, poor Mencken! It is the fate that awaits us all. Zarathustra in the market-place
18
NONSENSEORSHIP
feeding ground glass to the populace is gathered to the bosom of the City Fathers and gleefully enrolled as a member of the Guild.
Dissent in the Republic hard ways. Ten years ago the name upon of Mencken would have stood against the world. Today no college freshman, no lowly professor, no charity worker, or local alderman too puritanical to
is
This
no
idle rhetoric.
has come
do him homage.
the argument is that an era of enlightenment has set in, that this same Mencken and
Whereupon
contemporary throat-cutters have vanquished the Bugaboo, and that, as a result, a spirit of high
his
through the land. The proletaire have risen and are thumbing their nose at the gods. Brander Matthews has sent in a five
intellectual life prevails
years'
,The subscription to the Little Review. Comstocks overcome with the vision of their ghastly complexes are appealing to Sigmund Freud for
advice and
relief.
But
the argument
is
superficial.
"Victory!" cry the iconoclasts grinding their teeth at the absence of a foe.
But
foe
is
it is
a victory that rankles in the soul.
The
not vanquished but, seemingly, bored to death
has fallen asleep. It is, in any event, a phenomenon. Many generalizations offer themselves as
solace.
19
NONSENSEORSHIP
phenomenon is that Puritanism, beaten to a pulp by an ever-increasing herd of first, second, third, and fourth rate iconofirst
The
paradox of
this
clasts,
has triumphed completely in the legislatures
of the country. With every new volume exposing the gruesome mainsprings of the national virtue,
further taboos and restrictions crowd themselves

into the statute books.
would seem as if the bete populaire, becoming increasingly drunk with the consciousness
it
In a sense
its
of
off its
own power, is elatedly preoccupied in cutting own nose, tying itself up into knots, and
kicking itself in the rear, proclaiming simulta-
neously and in triumphant tones, "Observe how powerful I am. I can pass laws making ipecac a
compulsory
diet."
the laws are passed and the noble masses with heroic grimaces fall to devouring ipecac, to the confusion of all free-born stomachs.
Whereupon
In fact
this
species
of ballot flagellatism, this
diverting pastime of hitting itself on the head with a stuffed club has gradually elevated the body
occupied by the allpowerful king of Fernando Po. This mysterious being lives in the lowest depths of the crater of
politic to the enviable position
His power is in direct which hem him in. Convinced

Riabba.
20
ratio to the taboos
that bathing
is
NONSENSEORSHIP
crime against his dignity, that sunlight is incompatible with his royal lineage; convinced that his
prestige
fast
all
is
dependent upon a weekly three days'

piously convinced
and a cautious observation of the taboos against
variants of social intercourse
of these astounding things, the all-powerful monarch of Fernando Po sits year in and year out motionless
on
his
crater of Riabba,
throne in the lowest depths of the awed by himself and overcome
with the contemplation of his all-powerfulness. have here, I trust, an illuminating analogy.
We
The Republic, like this King of Fernando Po, imposes daily upon itself new taboos, new rituals. Yet there is the phenomenon of its tolerance toward
the idol breakers.
the lowest depths of the crater of Riabba in which he sits enthroned the
From
monarch of the Laongos condemns to death with a twitch of his brows all who seek to question the
sanctity of the taboos. But this other occupant of the crater of Riabba our Republic raises gentle
eyes to the idol wreckers, to the taboo destroyers. An occasional "tut tut" escapes him. And nothing
more.
Whereupon
the argument
is
that our
monarch of
the pit is an impotent fellow. Again, a superficial deduction. For behold the censorships with which
he belabors himself.
21
NONSENSEORSHIP
Censorship, almost extinct in the restriction of the national literature, thrives in every other field.
Censorships abound.
jurisdiction of
baseball, diversion, dress
Food, drink, movies, politics, all these are under the
a continually aroused censorship. The pulpits and editorial pages emit sonorous hymns of taboo. Every caption writer is an Isaiah,
every welfare worker fancies himself the handwriting on the wall. Unchallenged by the vote of the
masses or by any outward evidence of mass disssent,

the platitudes pile up, the nation is filled from morning to morning with stentorian clamor. Puri-
tanism in a frenetic finale approaches a climax. But, and we tiptoe towards the crux of this phenomenon, the Bacchanal of Presbyterianism is an
Unlike the day of the later Caesars, the populace does not abandon itself in imitation of its Neros and Caligulas. Instead, we have the spectacle of a populace apathetic toward
artificial
climax.
the spirit of
its
time.
is
The Puritan debauch
the logical culmination
of the anti-Paganism and backworldism launched two hundred centuries back. The Christian ethic,
to the bewildered chagrin of
its
advocates, has triitself
umphed. Not a triumph

juggling.
this
time that offers
as a cloak for Jesuitism, colonization, or empire
But an unimpeachable triumph

22
entirely
NONSENSEORSHIP
beyond the control of the most adroit of the
Machiavellis.
choir-
In other words the body politic finds itself bemoral frenzy anitrayed by its own platitudes.
mates
its
horizon.
But
it is
a frenzy of idea escaped
control, an idea grown too huge and luminous to direct any longer. The moral frenzy of the war was the moral frenzy of such an idea virtue be-
come a Frankenstein.
Rule, the
This virtue
the Golden
Thou
Shalt Nots, the thousand and one
unassailable maxims, adages, old saws invented chiefly for the protection of the weak and the solace
of the inferior
this virtue has
taken
itself
out of
the hands of
its hitherto adroit worshippers. snowball rolling uphill toward God and gathering furious dimensions, it has escaped the shrewd jani-
tors of orthodoxy
who from age to age were
able to
keep
it
within bounds.
in the war, confronted with the platitude
Thus
that the world
with the
safe for democracy further platitude that democracy
must be made
and and
equality were the goals of Christianity and with a dozen similar platitudes none of which had any authentic contact with the life of the nation, thus
confronted, the proletaire was forced to lift itself up by its boot straps and rise to the defence of a
Frankenstein idealism of which

23
it
was the parent-
NONSENSEORSHIP
victim.
has,
Disillusionment with the causes of the war

served
The high purpose. Frankenstein God, the Frankenstein virtue is still enshrined in the Heaven of the Copy Books. And
however,
no
worshipping, albeit with the squirmings and grimacings, a horrible idealizafind the proletaire
still
we
tion of itself.
escaped. They increase and multiply with a life of their own. Logic is the most irresponsible of the manias which oper-
The Thou Shalt Nots have
Logic demands that ideas be carried to their climax and this demand, as inexorable as Mr. Newton's law, has made a Frankenstein of the unate in
life.
suspecting Galilean. Hypnotized by the demands of logic, bewildered by the contemplation of this code of backworldism
which he himself seems somehow to have created,

the ballot maniac stands riveted at the polls and sacrifices to his own image by hitting himself on the
head with further virtuous restrictions
a gesture
necessary to prevent his own image from giving him the lie. He must, in other words, prove himself as virtuous, whenever public demonstration de-
mands, as the Frankenstein platitudes proclaim
him
to be.
The Puritanism
upheld by
its
of the nation,
its
remorselessly
is
laws and
public factotums
an
24
NONSENSEORSHIP
pose into which the blunhas tricked itself. There are dering proletaire innumerable consequences. have, firstly, the
artificial
extraneous and
We
spectacle of the masses disporting themselves slyly in the undertow of cynicism.
"Modesty," bellows Sir Frankenstein from pulpit and press, "is a cardinal virtue."
"Right O," echoes the feminine contingent and promptly bobs its hair, shortens its skirts, and rolls
down
its
socks.
"Abstinence, sobriety, are an economic and spiritual necessity," bellows Sir Frankenstein. Whereupon the male contingent votes the land
dry and gets drunk.

the foregoing we may derive glimmers of truth concerning the public tolerance of iconoclasts.
From
"Main
Street,"
a volume fathered by Mencken,
Freud, and the other Chaos-Bringers, leaps into prominence as a best seller. It is devoured and acclaimed by the ballot maniac who reads it, smacks his lips over its "truths" and sallies forth to vote
further canonizations of hypocrisy into the legal code. Even I, who ten years ago prided myself upon being as indigestible a type of the Incoherent
Young
month a
*
as the land afforded, find myself for one best seller* on my native heath. the
Woe
"Erik Dorn," Mr. Hecht's
first novel.
Ed.
25
NONSENSEORSHIP
prophet who
flee
with honor in his country! He will in disgust in quest of hair shirts and a bastinado.
is
Thus, the
citizens.
the iconoclasts
With the left hand they greet and hand them royalties. With the
right hand they pass further laws for the iconoclasts to denounce. phenomenon results. With the
thought of the masses becoming more and more neutral in the highty-tighty war between Good and
Evil, the laws created
more and more
rabid.
by these same masses grow But it must be borne in mind
that although the masses, carried away by flagellant impulses, assist in the creation of these laws, in the
main, they are laws, self-created platitudes which

give birth to new platitudes. Logic is the most pernicious of the Holy Ghosts responsible for the
conception of undesirable Gods. I am prepared now to make further revelations.
The
cies,
foregoing, although bristling with inconsistenseems to me, nevertheless, a ground work. I
will begin the apocalyptic finale with a
resume of
of
the choir-leaders, the high priests, the Sir Frankenstein.
Mahatmas
Item one
It
is
obvious that the laws of the land
being the ghastly climaxes of artificial logic and not of human desires or biological necessities, therefore the salaried apostles of these laws tion similarly outside nature.
must func-
26
NONSENSEORSHIP
The high priests,
it
develops indeed upon investi-
gation, diligently lickspittling to Sir Frankenstein, have no following. The masses are not going to
Heaven
They, the high priests, are magically out of touch with their worshippers.
in their wake.
And from day
to
day they grow further out of
touch until they are to be seen high in the clouds
tending the fugitive altars that are soaring toward
God on their own power.

These high priests are the creatures
petuate
its
elected,
com-
missioned and delegated by the proletaire to pergrandiose and impossible image. And They are the custodians of the public morals, meaning the protectors of the huge trick mirror out of which the complexes, neurasthenias,
this
they do.
and morbid fears of the public stare back at it in the guise of Virtue, Honor, Decency, and Love. These
custodians are also, to leap into the denouement, the censors here under discussion; censors not only
tolerated but insisted
upon by the people to annoy and harass them and inspire them to further ballot
flagellations in order that they, the people,
may
be spared the disaster of discovering themselves

different
from what two hundred centuries of self -idealization have driven them into believing
This, the high priests do.
27
themselves to be.
In every
village,
ham-
NONSENSEORSHIP
let
and farm they have

things
fit
their say.
They
chastise.
They make
wear or drink, and
for decent people to see or people flattered to death at the
idea of being considered decent submit piously to the distastement infringements and taboos. All-powerful are the censors. But despite this all-powerf ulness they labor under a wretched handi-
They are stupid. Stupidity is the paradox to be found most often in all-powerful Gods. They are stupid, the censors. And the Devil is clever.
cap.
The Seven Arts which
are the Seven Incarnations
of Dionysius, the Seven Masks of an unrepentant Lucifer, elude them in the horrific struggle. Or at
least partially elude
hoof
is
Occasionally a cloven spied and sliced to the bone.
them.
We return now with proud
and tranquil ease to
the beginning of this tale, to the phenomenon of a tolerated literary iconoclasm in a land alive with
caterwaulings of virtue. As hinted above not all the Arts escape, nor do any of them escape all the time. Music, whose sly
and
terrible vices
the high priests, "Jazz Incites to Sin.
were for centuries unperceived by has been brought to earth in places.

Syncopation
is
Devil's
Ally."
Discovered!
One
28
reads the morning paper
NONSENSEORSHIP
a return of hope. The High Priests are aroused. They have disembowelled an ally. There
and
is
feels
hope then of a bloody fray. Another Edition and they will be on our own heads, swinging their
snickersnees.
in public.
Mencken will be arrested and burned

will be strung
Anderson
and
his estates confiscated.
up by the heels There will be war

of the iconoclasts
red war, and
we
in the
army
growling impotently at each other will face about and have at them with hullaballo and manifesto
and snickersnee
in turn.
"Nude Painting Banned From Window. Nab Store Keeper." We read on. The snickersnee
swings towards the vitals of Hollywood. "Movie Magnate Charges Work of Art Cut; Sues Censors.
Seeks Redress in Courts."

Valhalla!
They
are closing
us.
in.
Another forced
march and they are upon

the alarms to sound.
still lives.
Alas, our coffee cools as
we
We
wait impatiently for are intact. Mencken
Anderson
still lives.
The
tide of battle
sweeps us by, passes us up, and there's the end to it. Again, our victory rankling, we cast about for
reasons.
the
Do not the censors read our books? censors read our books. And scratching
Yes,
their
necks pensively and immediately below their left ears, the censors fall asleep. Our books were over
29
NONSENSEORSHIP
their heads.
Our
broadsides aimed for their vitals
whizzed by their ears and lulled them into slumber. hideous victory is in our hands.
Voltaire blew
But
his
out of France for a century. that was because God was still an emotion in
God
day and not a Frankenstein of logic. He blew But that was because the high up priests still had enough intelligence in that time to know what constituted an epoch-shaking explosion.
the high priests.
the censors, the hallelujah flingers, commissioned, elected, delegated by the proletaire
Our enemies
are not worthy our steel. Having no longer any contact with the masses, they need no genius to perpetuate themselves. The masses care not what
they are so long as they are. Figureheads for Frankenstein, they need only shriek themselves blue and their will, will be done. Shrewdness, intelligence, are qualities non-essential since virtue,
no longer feeding upon shrewdness and

fattens
intelligence,
upon its own monstrous logic. The high priests are vital to the lie which man has
created for himself as a heaven and out of which

his
own image
leers godlike
back at him. They are

Since they need no
vital for
nothing else. Therefore our immunity.
grey matter, they have none.

stand us, they ignore us.
30
And unable to underAnd if we grow too
NONSENSEORSHIP
has Mencken, they put an end to the business by embracing us and pulling our fangs by disgusting us with their stupidity.
insistent, as
Given free reign under the conditions herein outlined, the youth of the land is abandoning itself to a safe and sane orgie of iconoclasm. Satanic
epigrams cloud the
very market-place. Poets, column conductors, hack literary reviewers,
air of the
hack romancers, lecturers,
realists, imagists,
and
all
are gloatingly engaged in sacking the Temple, in thumbing their nose at the taboos.
In
fact so widespread
is
the unlicensed and un-
rebuked iconoclasm of the day that a great disgust is being born in the hearts of the pioneers. Every
dog has
his
paradox, every hack his anti-Christ,
surveying the horizon despairingly they see no enemy rushing upon them with the wind.
they bewail.
And
There
are, of course, scattered here
and there
among the keepers of the Seal, observant priests. They omit isolated groans. They launch Quixotic sorties. But they retire and collapse without waiting combat.
sinful
To
their denunciation of "degenerate,
and corrupting cesspools of alleged art" (I quote from a review of some of my own work appearing in an issue of the Springfield (111.)
Republican) there
,
is
no answering response. They

31
NONSENSEORSHIP
are left abandoned, the Fiery Cross burning
to their fingers and flickering out. glorified into an enemy.
down
They cannot be
Ideas favor a
On the whole I
stand,
sides
fear for the result.
bloody battle-ground for birthplace.
And
here
we
drawn up
in battle array discharging broad-
of "Winesburgs, Ohios," "Main Streets," "Cornhuskers" and the like; flying our colors val-
iantly
but there
is
no
battle.
The enemy
issues
sleeps.
Or
the
enemy wakes up and
an indifferent
invitation that
we
stay to tea.
at all this and,
Comrade Dreiser may demur

peeling
his
vest,
reveal
us
wounds, honorable
wounds acquired
he
in honorable battle.
And
further,
may regale us with tales of hair shirts and bastinadoes suffered by him in the Republic. But alas,
Telemachus, grey-bearded and full of memories. And the youth of Athens, fallen upon softer ways, listen with envious incredulity to such tall
he
is
tales.
32
RUTH HALE AS A XXTH CENTURY WOMAN GUARDING THE HOME BREW
THE WOMAN'S PLACE

RUTH HALE
women of this country are about to a great service not one of those courtesy perform services about which so much is so volubly said and so little is done in repayment but a good sturdy
last the
AT
performance, that will probably bring these magnificent
men folks right to their knees.
are going to teach the unfortunates how to live under prohibitions and taboos. Of course
They
any prodigality of freedom in this country or any other but what there was to the men. The women had to take to belonged the home and stay there. So the two sexes adjusted
there has never been
themselves to
life
with this difference, that the

outwitting and circumventsmart twists and turns, all the
off
women had to do all the

ing,
all
the
little
cunning scheming by which people snatch they want without appearing to, whereas
their
what
got
men
much
it.
or
little
by
prosily sticking their hands
out for
33
NONSENSEORSHIP
This developed, naturally, not only somewhat diverse temperaments, but also greatly diverse
equipments.
When men cannot get what they want

paying for it, they have no Bless them, they must return into
now by
more
either asking or
resources.
the home, where the secret has been perfected for centuries on centuries of how to hoard a private
stock and
how
to find a bootlegger.
Under
the
steadily growing nonsenseorship regime, they are obliged to come and take lessons from the lately despised group of creatures to whom nonsenseor-
a well-thumbed story. If the world outside the home is to become as circumscribed and paship
is
ternalized as the world inside
it,
obviously
all
the
advantage lies with those who have been living under nonsenseorship long enough to have learned
manage it. Thus woman moves over from her dull post as keeper of the virtues to the far more important and
ideal
to
exciting post as keeper of the vices. It is not an power which she thus acquires. But then none of this is about ideals. This is just a little practical
study in what is going to happen, and why. Taboos never yet have added a cubit to the stature
of the soul of humanity. They have nearly always been the chattering children of fear and pure idiocy. They have always tried to throw the race
34
NONSENSEORSHIP
back on to
all fours,
and have
left the nobility of
standing upright wholly out of account. The taboos which have surrounded women time
out of mind have been so puerile and imbecile that
one quite non-partisanly wonders why on earth second they have been allowed to continue.
thought demonstrates, of course, that fear has had the major part in it, and that skill in cheating has
gone so far as practically to nullify the privations

of the taboo.
But one must put by

ity,
this
hankering after nobil-
and accept the plain fact that fear is the dominant human motive. What the race would do if fear were conquered, or at least faced sternly eye
to eye, is staggering to contemplate. Perhaps God looks upon that vision. It may be that which gives
Him
patience.
But man
a
lifetime.
at best gives
it
one
terri-
fied squint in
All behavior must take
fear into account.
The man who lately brought back from the Amazon Basin news of a fear-dispelling drug used
by a savage tribe, would have been carried home from the steamer on the shoulders of his compatriots if for one moment he had been believed. His drug may do all he claimed for it, but a country
there
which boasts a Volstead in

itself to
full stride
cannot force
likely part
take him seriously.

35
The only
NONSENSEORSHIP
was that the tribes who prepared the would put to instant death any woman who drug
of his story
happened
either to learn
how
to prepare
it
or did
actually get
some of
it
into her.
We
made
thing
recognize that part as familiar. the same fight here against the fearless
We
have
woman
as the savages
made on
the
Amazon.
The only
to apply was the moral of the Kipling story about the two greatest armies in the world: the men who believed that they
we were never smart enough
could not die
till
their time came, against those
who
wanted to
die as soon as possible.
It
was from one

This
or the other of these two kinds of fearlessness that
women
have trained themselves in wisdom.
is the wisdom which moves them to secret laughter when they find their brothers in the throes of Volstead and Krafts. And it is from this wisdom that they will teach them all to be happy, though
prohibited.
It
is
an unfortunate fact that humanity

itself.
will not
behave
It does not really
warm
to
any of
the current virtues.
When the Eighteenth Amendliquors, its inner
ment says
it
must not drink hard

is
heart's desire
to drink them, even
beyond
its
nortrue,
mal, and usual capacity. one of the strikingly superimposed virtues.

Prohibition
is, it is
It has
nothing whatever to recommend

36
it
in
man's true
NONSENSEORSHIP
feelings,
traits,
and
this is
not true of
many
of the civilized
entire approval.
though probably not any of them meets with We do think that before anything
is
approaching a real art of living

us, the present ethical
perfected
among
moded.
the least
system Meanwhile, pressure brought to bear on welcome of all virtues is merely going to
behavior worse.
will be wholly out-
make bad
business, not ours.
But that is Volstead's Let him do battle with that
octopus, while we bring up reinforcements to his enemies. Women know all about how to be bad and
comfortable while the law goes on trying to make them good and otherwise. Just look at a few of
the things on which they have cut their teeth.
do not know, unfortunately, just at what point in her history woman went under the long siege of her taboos. Whether the system of keeping her publicly helpless and interdicted goes before
church and
state, or
We
was the
result of them, there
is
now no
history to tell us.
But
certainly she always
had one supreme power and one supreme weakness, and somewhere in time, her more neutrally equipped male companion played the one against
her, to save his
own
skin
from being stripped by the
other.
But if the past is foggy, the present is not. do know what is now, and has for a long time
37
We
been,
NONSENSEORSHIP
a shocking
to do.
list
of what she must not be allowed
She cannot own and control her own property, for instance, except here and there in the world. Perhaps the theory was that she could not create property. But one would have said that such of it as she inherited she had as sound a right to as that that her brother inherited. But no such common sense notion prevailed. No matter how she came by it, it became her husband's as soon as she mar-
The law has always behaved as if a woman became a half-wit the moment she married. Seeried.
ing what she deliberately lost by it, perhaps the law She lost control of her possessions, inis right.
cluding herself. She lost her citizenship, and she lost her name, though this by custom and not by
law.
And
finally, she
even over her

create.
own
never could acquire control children, which certainly she did
do not know how many of these diswould have been excused on the ground that they were for her own good. It seems likelier that they came under the head of that fine old ababilities
We
straction, the general good.
No
longer back than
1914, H. G. Wells, in "Social Forces in England and America" observed that they would probably never be able to give women any real freedom because there were the children to consider. Mr.
38
NONSENSEORSHIP
Wells did not appear
a horrible
conflict in
to
know
that he
was bridging
terms with a pretty fatuity. Nor did he later give himself pause when, towards the end of the book, he complained that all the ba-
were being had by the low grade women, while the high grade ones were quite insensible to their
bies
duties.
It
was possibly with an unruliness of
this
kind in
contemplation that the law decided that women should know nothing of birth control. Now there's
a taboo for you. Many of our very best people the moral element, so called will not even speak
the words.
But that prohibition,
like all the others,
has
its
side door
trance? to
may one say its small-family enThe women who do not know all there is
are just those poor, isolated, and economically starved who should
know about it ignorant women

be the
first
to be told.
Consider the quaintest,

scriptions against
citizenship in
if it is
we
women their own right. What
think, of all the prothat they cannot have

is
citizenship
not the assumption, made by the State, that because you were born within it, and had grown used to it and fond of it, and were attached to it
by all the associations of blood ties, friendships, and what not, you were therefore entitled to take
part in
it,
and could be
called
on to give
it
service ?
39
NONSENSEORSHIP
If citizenship is a mere legal figment, by what right do States send their citizens to war? Yet women
are theoretically transferred, body and bone, heart, memory, and soul, to whatever country or nation
husbands happen to give allegiance to. Isadora Duncan, born in California, of generations of Californians, and American all her life, has lately
their
married a young Russian poet. Hereafter she must

enter her country as an alien immigrant if it so happens that the quota is not closed. Does anybody in his senses imagine that Isadora Duncan
has been changed, or could be changed, for better or worse? An opera singer who was in danger dur-
ing the war of losing her position at the Metropolitan Opera House because she was an enemy alien,
went forth and married an American. By that means she was actually supposed to have been made over into an American. Can naivete go further? For our present purposes we merely want to point out that what is done to one woman in the
name
one to serve her
of the public good is craftily used by the next own ends. There is a terrifying
proportion of women in America today who can vote, without knowing a word of our language, without participating in one particle of our com-
mon
life,
because their husbands have taken on

citizenship.
American
They wouldn't be allowed

40
NONSENSEORSHIP
to become
American
citizens if they
wanted
to,
by
any other means. There are scores and

ties conscripting
scores of these legal absurdi-
women. Twenty books could be written about them, and probably will be. But we must leave them, with such representation as these few instances afford, and go from the body of taboos that are done in the name of the
the activities of
good of the State, to that collection done for woman's own personal good. Some of these are legal and some are not, but
they are
all operative.
They
are all things she has
to go around, or under.
She cannot serve on juries.
always righteously barred from courtrooms when there is to be testimony concerning sex. Woman, the mother of children, the realist of sex
is
She
compared to whom the most sympathetic of males is at best an outsider, is to be "protected" from a few scandalous narratives. Of course all women know that they are barred from juries not because the happenings in court would shock or even surprise them, but because they would embarrass their far more sensitive and finicky men. So what they wish to know of court proceedings, they learn from
their
homes.
in the pleasant privacy of their If the juries are so much the worse for this sort of thing, and they are, the matter cannot be
good men,
41
NONSENSEORSHIP
helped by the ladies, dear knows, and the men would die almost any death liefer than that of rav-
aged modesty. Probably the most ungrateful of the restrictions on females is that forbidding them to hold office in churches. This has been put on all sorts of high
grounds, chief among them being that women could do so much abler work in little auxiliaries of
their
own.
This contention was challenged about
two years ago in the House of Commons, by Maud Hoyden, the English Lay Evangelist to whom the pulpits of London are forbidden, with one or two Miss Hoyden, whose preaching was exceptions. being bitterly opposed by several members of the House, annoyed them all considerably by saying that the Church of England had already had two women as its absolute head. This was denied in a
great sputter, to which Miss Hoyden replied, "How about Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria?"
Well,
happened to be something that nobody could gainsay, but into the wrathy silence which
this
followed, one
member
of the
House
rose to his feet
and
let
the cat right out of the bag.
If
women were
given church authority, he said, they would refuse to accept their husbands' authority in their homes,
and England would go to rack and ruin. This is one of the few recorded occasions when a taboo-er
42
NONSENSEORSHIP
so far forgot himself, and American church potentates do not like to be reminded of it. Within a
month, one of the Protestant
country has given women the right to hold minor offices, but three others, in general convention, refused even to
consider
it.
sects in this
are going to rest our case on selected instances, and return to a consideration of how
these walled-in
Again we
women have
after
all,
learned to live com-
fortably and with some

rison wall.
self-respect behind the gar-
It
is this,
which they must
now
teach their men.
The
first
thing that happened to the

she
woman who
married was that she became legally non-existent.
But though
was scratched
off the public books,
she couldn't exactly be scratched out of her husband's scheme of general well-being. Neither
could the race
make
great strides without her.
After everything in the world had been done to make her as harmless as possible, she still remained
non-ignorable. Two courses were open to her; and she has always used whichever of the two was neces-
sary at the time. She could be so sweet and beguiling, so full of blandishments, that man rushed out
to bring her all and hibited from having.
more than she had been pro-
by her temper and
she could terrify him, both her biological superiority, into

43
Or
NONSENSEORSHIP
and thanking
whole
skin.
stopping his entire precious machinery against her, his stars that he could get off with a
course these things have not always worked out just so. There have been the tragic mischances.
Of
But
in the main,
an oppressed people learn how to
outsmile or outsnarl the oppressor.
The Eighteenth
was dead. Mr.
Amendment may yet
live to
wish
it
Volstead seems to have believed that the nonsenseorship game was new and exciting, and could be trusted to carry itself by storm. Not while the an-
wisdom of long-borne bans and communicadoes looked out of the female eye. There was a
cient
body of experts in existence of whom, apparently, he had never even heard.
He
never once thought
how
the twentieth cen-
tury was to become known as the Century of The Home, with the home brew, and the subscription
editions,
and the
sagacities of
women. If he should
complain that there is no honor and fine living in all of this, we shall have to agree with him. But we can
answer that by guile we have preserved our joys, and cleared our way out from the shadows of his
big totem pole.
If
we have but
virtues.
little
magnificence,
is
we have
a
little
as
much
as
anybody can ever have who
hounded by the legal
gaiety for life, bite the dust. It isn't pretty, but 44
we may keep by that much do we make him

if
it's art.
And
XQ
WALLACE IRWIN COMPOSING UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF SYNTHETIC GIN AND ANDREW VOLSTEAD
OWED TO VOLSTEAD
WALLACE IEWIN
I
First
Round
alcohol, so
Prune extract and bright
wooden
oil!
One
kills its flavor in
rank fusel
C2
To
H HO
5
a rather good 'un

fruity syrups in our toil
To mix with
give our social meetings after dark Their necessary spark! And you, most heavenly twins,
Born
of one mother
Although our woe begins
When, through our mortal
sins,
We
Ethyl
can't tell
which from 'tother
And Methyl!
Like Ike
And Mike
Strangely you look alike. Like sisters I have met
You're very hard to tell apart and yet The one consoles' more gently than a wife;
The
Such
other turns and cripples
you
for life.
spirits as these, and many more I summon From many a poisoned tin, Or many a bottle falsely labelled "Gin"
45
NONSENSEORSHIP
Or many
a vial pathetic,
Yclept "Synthetic." Like Dante on his joy-ride Seeing Hell, Fain would I take you down
Through sulphurous fires and caverns Into the Land of Mystery and Smell
bilious
brown
Where Satan steweth
And home-breweth
While thirsty hooch-hounds
Their blackest curse, Or worse:
yell
"Vol-darn our souls with each Vol-blasted dram
That burns our throats and
isn't
it
worth a dam
We
drink, yet
how we dread
it.
Vol-steadit!"
They've said
II
Short Intermission to Change Meter

In Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-three A. Lincoln set the darkies free ;
In Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen

A. Volstead muzzled the canteen
And freed the From bondage
millions, great
and small,
to
King Alcohol.
Was
it not thoughtful, good and kind For such a man of such a mind To show an interest so grand
In his misguided native land?
And
don't these statements illustrate

to date?
Our Nation's progress up
We're freedom-loving and we're brave
And
simply cannot stand a slave.
46
NONSENSEORSHIP
And when
a crisis needs a man From Mass, or Tex. or Conn, or Kan. That man steps forward, firm of chi So Andrew Volstead came from Minn.
He came
That gin
from Minn,
is
to
show the world
wrong
And And
rye is strong Scotch to limbo should be hurled.
Thus with his spotless flag unfurled He went against the Demon Rum Who snarled, "I vum!" Got sort of numb,
While
Rolled up his eyes, lay down and curled all the saints of heaven above
(Including Mr. Bryan's Dove) Cried "Rah-rah-rah

!
And
But,
siss-boom-ah
Three cheers for Health and Christian Love!
Andrew dear
!"
Say, now, look here! You're not including wine and beer
Then Andrew Volstead squared his And answered briefly, "Sin is sin." No compromise
chin
With
the King of Lies Both liquor thick and liquor thin

!
We'll cease to tax
And
use the axe
Invented by the
For right
A spell
from Minn. and wrong is wrong right has cursed the world too long.
is
Man
47
NONSENSEORSHIP
The
curse
<tf
drink
Stop, friends, and think How, reft of spirits' weak or strong,
My
Nation will be purified
Of all corruptions vile. The lamb and lion, side by side,

Will smile and smile and smile.
The workman when
his
day
is
o'er
Will hurry to his cottage door
To kiss his loving wife; He'll lay his wages in her hand And peace will settle on the land
Without a trace of
strife.
The
criminals will cease to swarm,
Forgers and burglars will reform
And minor
crimes will so abate
That lower courts now open late Will close and let the magistrate
Go
to the zoo
Or read Who's Who.

In short I do anticipate
A thinner,
Its
cooler
human
race,
system cleansed of every trace
Of
inner
fire
And
And
"
hot desire
passions spurring to disgrace.
'Tis simple," said the
Man
from Minn.,
"To
cure the world of mortal sin
Just legislate against
it."
Then up spake Congress with
a roar,
"We
never thought of that before.

Let's go!"
And
they commenced
it.
48
ROBERT KEABLE URGING THE AUTOMATON CALLED CITIZEN TO TURN ON HIS OPPRESSOR
THE CENSORSHIP OF THOUGHT

ROBERT KEABLE
a man, about a year ago, who published a novel upon which the critics fell with such fury
KNEW
this side the
water at
least, that
whether in the body
or out of the body, such was ultimately his state of bewilderment, he could not tell, and if I am
asked to discuss "Prohibitions, Inhibitions and

legalities" it
is
Il-
natural that the incident should be
foremost in
True, it is becoming increasingly the fashion for a parson to preach a sermon without announcing text, but modern preaching,
like brief bright brotherly breezy
my mind.
modern
services,
does not seem to cut
much ice. Therefore we will hark back to the manner of our forefathers and
It affords an admir-
take the incident for a text.
able example of nonsenseorship. As is always done in approved sermons
(but
humbly entreating your forbearance, which is less common) let us consider the context, let us review
the circumstances of the case in point. Our author left the lonely heart of Africa for the theatre of
53
NONSENSEORSHIP,
war
in France.
He
left
a solitude, a freedom, a
beauty, of which he had become enamoured, for that assemblage of all sorts of all nations, in a cockpit of din
and fury, known as the Western Front. He expected this, that, and the other; mainly he found the other, that, and this. Being desirous of
serving the
of things as they are, he pondered, he observed, and, his heart burning within him, he
God
had no opportunity of writing in he wrote on his return, away up in the France, so Drakensberg mountains, alone, with the clean veld
wrote.
He
wind blowing about him and the nearest town an hour's ride away, and that but three houses when he reached it. He had seen vivid things and it chanced he was able to write vividly. There were twenty chapters in his novel and he wrote them in
twenty days.
The novel
finished, the
MS.
of
it
was despatched
to nine publishing firms in succession,
who
silently
but swiftly refused it. It only went to the tenth at all because there is luck in a round number,
and
it
found a home because

its
it
it
found a free man.
On
the eve of
appearance,
it
was hung up for

whereas the book-
a month because
sellers
was
felt that
might display a book containing a certain passage which referred to a woman's bosom, they would not do so if it contained a plural synonym.
54
NONSENSEORSHIP
(I offer abject apologies for these dreadful deAnd when it finally appeared, the main tails.)
portion of the English Press cried to heaven against it, and a smaller section clamoured for disciplinary
action.
For a
hectic
month the author, who had
simply and plainly written of things as they were, honestly without conception that anyone existed
who would doubt

sity for
their truth or the obvious neces-
saying them, sat amazed before the storm.
that incident, unimportant to the world at large as it is, does afford an admirable example of that censorship which is about us at every turn.
Now
True, in this case, the
official
censor remained
silent.
Although prepared to read passages from Holy Scripture in the witness-box, and challenge a denial of the facts, the author was not called upon to do
so.
He
had previously given
slight hints of the
truth about the racial situation in South Africa in
another book and had had that volume censored

out of existence, but perhaps because this present work merely touched on morals the official censor
decided to give him rope with which to hang himself. He was hung, of course, rightly and convinc-
hung by the neck till he was dead. Thus a clergyman who took the book from a circulating
ingly,
library because of
its
it
Scriptural
in
55
title,
and whose
daughters wrapped
The Church Times and
NONSENSEORSHIP
read
it
over the week-end, declined to meet him at
dinner.
bishop cut him in the street.

too.
Very
rightly
and properly
The book
honestly,
simply, undisguisedly, told the truth. Since then America has been good enough to recognise it.
But
this is at least the first consideration of
British censorship today: it must suppress the truth about most of the important things in life. Take
the allied case of the

told that he
Unknown
Warrior.
We
are
to
was a crusader, that he was glad
die in a noble cause, that his valour deserved the
Victoria Cross and his religion Westminster Abbey. In short he was a saint. But, one protests (a bit
bewildered because
it
not the
man
I knew.
sounds so good) that was The man I knew lived next
door and was a damned good chap. The man I knew chucked up his business and left his home and
risked his
cause
it
because everybody was doing it, beseemed there was a real mess-up, because
life
one had
Also,
to.
it was a change. Oddly enough, Adam out from a modern office or a modern factory goes in order to hoe up weeds in the sweat of his brow
and
danger of his life with barely a regret for the Paradise he has to leave. Besides Eve went
in
with him.
God, there were Eves

to
in
France!
forget,
Women who knew how
make
man
56
NONSENSEORSHIP
women who
the
didn't count the cost,
women who loved
for love's sake.
And
for this and other causes,
extraordinarily bored to die, except that he came not to care so at having much so long as he was sure he was only to be asked
to die.
Unknown Warrior was
As
for his valour

if it's
Well, said he,
it's
no
use grousing, and

it
a question of bayonets, had better be mine in the other chap's stomach.
English-speaking peoples don't shout about our valour. And as for religion Well, if there's a God why doesn't He stop this bloody war,
Besides
or,
we
anyway, where the blazes is He? There you are. It's abominable to write
like
that.
see, it
Here
it is
in print; isn't
it
happens
to be true.
But
disgraceful? You if men said that,
loud enough and enough of them, there would be no more wars. No more wars? There would be
no more Downing Street either, and an American army would march, as like as not, on Washington.
Disgraceful! It's so disgraceful that I am not sure, as I write, that this article will ever be printed. Now since the War it is noticeable that the spirit
of censorship has very visibly increased its activities among us. There is little doubt of that and there
is little
doubt of the reason for
it.
The War, by
tearing
down shams and by

to the essentials, forced
57
stripping
men and
women
many
to see things
NONSENSEORSHIP
as they are. The old lies were no use in that hour, nor the old conventions and beliefs. Men learned to look
beyond them, and they learned not to be Partly it was no use being afraid in the War and men got out of the habit, and partly,
afraid to look.
having looked, they saw something so much better ahead. Or again the trend of modern civilisation
was
of
so
its
unarguably revealed in all the stark horror inhumanity that men saw suddenly that it
was better to be brave and revolt and be killed than be cowardly and submit and live. great many of those who saw did not survive to tell the tale, but some did. There are more men and women about today who are not to be put off with humbugs than ever there were before. Such folk make up an element in Society which the censors know to be something more than dangerous.
They are men who cannot easily be bribed for they have seen through the worth of the bribe, who cannot be intimidated because they no longer fear, and
who cannot be cheated because they have values. Hence your new censorship and
ods.
seen true
its
meth-
Rebels must be drowned
in a babble of words.
They must be suppressed by the action of the unthinking masses rolled up upon them. They must
be ground to powder upside down.
58
lest
they should turn the world
NONSENSEORSHIP
That, then,
is
the basis of censorship. Fear.
You
tell
can do most things in England today except
the truth, or, at any rate, except tell the truth in such a way that people will believe you. At the
time of the French Revolution there was a broadsheet in circulation which showed
on one
side
Louis
XVI in his coronation robes. He was a fine figure

His flowing wig descended majestically and his shapely leg, thrust But on the reverse, a forth, dominated a world. pimply shrunken figure emerged from the bath.
of a man.
to his broad shoulders
Shortly after publication they had a revolution in France.
Now the War circulated such another broadsheet

in the world.
Here
is
the
official side
of
it.
Mar-
riage
is
made
in heaven.
Politicians are earnest,
devoted men.
One's own country always fights for Right without Fear and without Reproach. Miltalism
lionaires are nearly

is
always philanthropists. Capia just, kindly, and reasonable basis for Society. The General Confession has become the
national prayer of Englishmen. Modern Civilisation is thoroughly healthy and every day it gets better and better. It is so. It must be so. What's
that?
You have known a politician

is
Your
im-
friend
married and
Brother,
it is
possible.
You must
not say so anyway: the whole

59
NOISTSENSEORSHIP
fabric of Society will be shaken. think so for a moment.
You must
not
You must not

new
think
so.
That
is
the creed of the It

is
odd Middle Ages of the Inquisition were so nonsensical, judged by our standards. Grand inquisitors cared remarkably little how a man thought provided he did not say what he thought too publicly. If he went to church once a year he might be a Jew for all their interference.
If he signed the Thirty-nine Articles he might use a rosary in his own home. If Columbus thought
the world was round, he was welcome to go and see, but if Galileo said that the Church was wrong
for saying the world was flat, there was nothing for it but to shut him up in prison. It was all rather
stupid, but
it
censorship. thing that the
And
very sensible, too.
an
was
interesting.
For above
well defined.
all things,
the limits of censorhip were
Censorship was based on hypotheses. It was conceived that Almighty God had established St. Peter as a censor of public faith
morals, but
and was not maintained that he was established as the censor of art and literature and life. There was thus originality in all these affairs. In a mediaeval town every house was different, in a mediaeval cathedral no two pillars were alike, and in the dress of a mediaeval crowd was captured the
it
60
NONSENSEORSHIP
colours of the rainbow.
With an odd
result.
Men
[laughed at the devil in the freedom of their souls.
'They tweaked
in
on carven misericords, and the mystery play he was invariably cast for the
his tail
this,
clown.
Further, and in close accord with

feature of the old Inquisition burnt you for the good of your
'all
a pleasant
tried
was that
it
and
own soul, and despite
calumnies and mis-representations on the part of later writers, that remained to the end the main
imotive of the rack
and of the
stake.
Personally
hard to suppose that some such consideration in any way lightened the last hours of the
I find
it
'victim,
but at least
it
enlightens our
judgment of
'the inquisitor.
Heresy was
to him, quite honestly,
a form of lunacy. Public opinion agreed with him. It was a species of moral and mental hydrophobia,
and the mass of men no more desired to be converted

to heresy than we desire to be bitten by mad dogs. In their simple souls they abhorred and feared the
auto-da-fe as an act of and rejoicing. They might have been faith, piety, a Paris crowd watching the last hours of such a social pest and terror as Landru, except that it probably occurred to few of the Parisian sightthing.
seers to
They attended an
pray for that murderer's
soul.
But
the
modern
Inquisition, the neo-censorship,

61
NONSENSEORSHIP
is
out, not to save
my
soul,
but the souls of
my
contemporaries. It does not imagine that I am preaching a hideous thing from which all men will revolt; it imagines that I am offering them some-
thing which they will gladly and readily accept. It does not judge me and my sayings and doings from the standpoint of an accredited representative
of society, but from the standpoint of a non-acIt silences me for credited governor of society.
fear that I
be followed, not lest I should be damned. It does not censor me for speaking or acting against an established order in which every-
may
but for speaking or acting against an order in which practically everyone has ceased to one
believes,
"Burn him," cried Torquemada; "he has spoken what no one thinks." "Bury him," cries your modern censor; "he has thought what no one
believe.
speaks."
Thus, today, the point is that you may not think. All the energies of the censorship are bent towards
the prohibition of thought. For one penny, every morning, even if you are an Englishman in Paris, a daily newspaper will tell you what to think and
castigate
you
if
you think
otherwise.
No,
it
is
three halfpence in Paris. But that is the idea. That is the great conspiracy. Certain news-items
are regaled to me, certain news-items are sup62
NONSENSEORSHIP
pressed, in order that I may not think amiss. Certain books are refused me, certain plays must not
be produced, certain fashions are taboo, certain things may not be done, lest, by any chance, I should
form the habit of thinking, lest I should step out of the throng and be myself. Lest I should make a venture of personal opinion, and be right. The odd thing is that the average man lends himself to the deception and even plays his part in
the great game. Of course he is not altogether to blame. The psychology of the method is so truly
It is dinned into him so repeatedly that are so, that black is white and white is black, things that if you see it in Bottomley's John Bull it is so,
conceived.
that he honestly comes to believe the bunkum. For is a conservative he, too, fears at his heart.
He
animal.
Men
believed in
used to burn a heretic because they God; now they censor him out of ex-
istence because if they did not believe in the North-
press they would have nothing whatever in which to believe. Men used to believe in the Ten
cliffe
Commandments; now they accept

cause
if
Prohibition be-
they did not accept some authority they would have to govern themselves. Men used to
believe the Bible;
now they
believe the daily papers
because
lift
if
up
their eyes
they did not they would be compelled to and look on life.

63
NONSENSEORSHIP
But Robert Louis Stevenson wrote
the whole
truth and nothing but the truth a while ago. "If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others
think of him, unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the principles of the majority of his contemporaries
you must
he
will
discredit in his eyes the authoritative
voice of his
own
soul.
He may
And
be a docile
citizen;
Bernard Shaw was not far out when, in the Introduction to Man and Super-Man, he pointed out what amiable honest
never be a man."
gentlemen the free-booters who built the Rhine castles were compared with your modern mil.
lionaires,
newspaper-owners, and political bosses. The robber-baron risked his neck. The robber-
baron played a game. The robber-baron mostly warred on his own mates who were also playing
the game. But the robber-baron of today would enslave the souls of men because he has forgotten
how else to enjoy himself. The net result then is that we
are fast abandon-
"Not merely is any attempt at original thought or action cleverly stifled with pillows much as the princes were smoth-
ing any attempt to think for ourselves.
ered in the Tower, but the censors of our freedom
shout so loudly and supply us with mental goods so cheaply that in the end we have no real mental
power of choice
left.
A million advertisements tell

64
NONSENSEORSHIP,
me
that all decent people shave with Apple-Blossom soap, and with Apple-Blossom soap I shave.
score of papers tell
me Germany
is
undertaxed and
can pay Reparations, and I sit quiet while France occupies the Ruhr. Or vice-versa, as the case or
Every child goes to school and every school is under Government control and every Government teaches that it is good for you to be governed and for the world that it should govern.
another
may
be.
few years ago we were told that we had to be organised and schooled and managed because the nation was at war, but the thing is fast becoming a habit, and we have now to be managed and schooled and organised because the nation is at
peace. It is indeed just here that censorship has gone mad. It must have been horribly unpleasant to
burn at the
faction of
stake, but at least
you had the
satis-
knowing had some shadow of reason behind him. He had at least an hypothesis. He acted reasonably in its
it
that the
man who lit the faggots
He believed something; he believed with some horse-sense; and he acted as the saviour of Society. But today our censors have nothing
application.
one supposes them to be more moral, more charitable, more instructed than other men still less does anyone suppose them to be more
behind them.
;
No
65
NONSENSEORSHIP
They do inspired or dowered with divine right. not defend a faith for which they, too, would die; they merely bolster up a position because in so doing they find bread and butter. They do not object to innovators because what they innovate is bad;
they object to innovators because they innovate. They do not object to us because they believe that we tell lies; they object because they know that
we
tell
the truth.
is all
This, then,
to be?
very well, but what
is
the end
theologians have always .said that did Almighty God left man free to sin because not want automatons. It is exactly here, however,
The
He
modern censors improve on the Deity. They do want automatons. Only automatons will face liquid fire and poison gas. Only automatons will live in a jerry-built cottage in a modern town and pay heavily for the privilege. Only automthat your
atons will vote correctly at elections and keep the political business going and allow everything to
run on smoothly for the next war.

atons will
Only automagree to the lengthening of skirts from
the knee to the ankle.
only automatons will acquiesce in a system of morality which is not built on divine revelation or even on social necessity, but
And
on exploded superstitions and sex domination and

the conventions of the propertied classes.
66
NONSENSEORSHIP
Thus the
his
devil
is
coming surely but

all
steadily into
in-
own.
We
have already half-accepted an
verted order, allowing that

his
the good tunes are
and attributing to him things which he knows well enough he has no right to call his own. In a few years we shall neither use tobacco nor the grape,
gifts of the
good God, nor dance nor choose our
own
clothes nor laugh nor think.
We shall
scurry
and thither before the flick of the devil's tail and be ready for the burning. We shall have sold our birthright of daring for an insipid mess of pottage: sold our right to choose and to spare, to slay and to leave alive, to be glad and to be sorry, to be martyrs if we would be, to explore, to risk, to win. We shall be docile and respectable, and the standard of our docility and respectability will have been set by men no better and no worse than we are.
hither
We shall be sober by act of Parliament, and moral

if it
be morality
because
we have
lost the notion
of being anything else. shall be of no use whatever to God, and precious small beer for the
devil.
We
And
is
there no
Let any man by what authority he is censoring and who gave him that authority. Let him ask by what standards he is judging and in whose interests, and let
67
of escape? There truly is, ask the first censor that he sees
way
NONSENSEORSHIP
him what he thinks of his standards and Let him say BOO and see how foolish interests. the goose can look. Laugh, for Neo-Puritanism
him
tell
cannot stand laughter. Much else it can stand, but not that. Don't argue the old enemy is mighty
;
good
at words.
Don't
hit; there
are few of you
strong enough.
But
is
on laughing, for it the world. There
laugh, laugh honestly, and go the only invincible weapon in
is
no more merry music
either,
and
it is
the melody for
Men.
68
HELEN BULLITT LOWRY WATCHING PURITANISM SET THE FLAPPER FREE
THE UNINHIBITED FLAPPER

HELEN BULLITT LOWRY
Two
One
generations ago the girl was "damned." generation ago she was "ruined." Now, ac-
cording to the best authorities and her tion, she has just played out of luck.
own
valua-
So that for the reformers and prohibitionists, the censors and the woman's club resolutionists Their
!
bi-product is Miss Twentieth Century Unlimited, the one uninhibited creature in a Volsteaded civilisation.
Controls
of liquor and of birth
have
given us
The Flapper.
The
official
reformers, re-
inforcing the sagging inhibitions and corsets of the nineteenth century, were just the final impetus
needed to drive her out into the open.
from the strangle hold that is throttling the rest of us. If somebody makes a law for her, she promptly and blithely breaks it, the pocket flask for the moment being the outward and visible sign of the spirit and spirits of her
flapper
is
The
released
wide-flung rebellion.
It
is
the milepost between the
69
NONSENSEORSHIP
time that was and the time that
to
it
is,
that flask, and
we owe the
single standard of drinking. half generation ago the sub-debs did not
in-
dulge in anything more relaxing than coca cola. And even first and second year debbies did their
drinking from glasses issued by the hostess, not in triplicate. If a young man of the period imported
a flask from the outside, that young
man was
promptly dropped from polite society, no matter how stringent was the shortage of dancing beaux. [They called a flask a "bottle of whiskey" in those
days.
Wild
oats
were reserved for the boys at
college.
If you were of Eve's sheltered sex, you really had

to become a
member
of the Fast
Young Married
before you could get a look in. That Fast Young Married Crowd was the first to come out of the biological fastnesses of the Mid- Victorian era into the cocktails and jazz of our Mid-Victrolian
period.
Crowd
had to keep yourself the kind of a girl you'd been told a man wanted to marry, if you ever wanted to join in a cocktail party and slide
Moral:
You
down
rumor had it the Fast Young Married Crowd was doing on its orgies. Over the border of matrimony lay the mysthe banisters uninhibited
as
teries of the
gay wild
life.
70
NONSENSEORSHIP
In that era before our morals were legislated, being "that kind of a girl" was a trying responsiThere was an approved technique that bility. every wise virgin had to master. It consisted of letting each man, on whom she conferred her favors, think that she really was in love with him. She
"being engaged." And, came to possess a harem of fiances,
called
it
if
perchance she
so well able
remember that
the
young things of the period were not
to conduct their
courtings as our present-day emancipated flappers. They still had to depend on what the tide washed in. They still did their pick-
own
ing from those that picked them over at their leisure.
and sorted 'em
Then, too, a half generation ago, we had not read our Freud. did not know the jargon of sex.
We
Both man and

emotion
girl
were apt to
call "in love" the
present-day young things frankly call something else. Thus came it that the petting parties of the period operated under the left wing of a near-engagement.
which
our
Yet
fiance
there
was a weakness to the system.
Each
had the lordly impression that he "possessed" the lady of his choice. And the minute the male feels that he possesses a woman, he can get all the
psychology of "riding away" and leaving her. Freudian flappers are better strategians.
71
Our
Man
NONSENSEORSHIP
simply can't labor under the impression that he possesses a young person, if her lingo is calling the
once sacred kiss just a "flash of pash." slang is a great leveller of romance.
Applied
For times have changed

for a
since
it
was good form
maid
to avoid the crass mention of sex.
With
felt
prohibition has
come such an outburst of Get Moral

is
Quick
legislation that the reaction
now being
throughout the length and breadth of the flapper. The legislators would lengthen the skirts to protect the defenceless male from a chance thought of legs and the like. Whereat the flapper retaliates by
conversing
pretty ceaselessly about well, say associated subjects. Last season the writer, being of the genus Successfully Single, woke up with a start to realize that
two
had toyed with her hook and retreated. One of them had even exited, uttering a fatal accusation about a "trammelled soul." Such
desirables
a warning calls for a taking of stock. And this is what I found Because of the flappers and the way
:
they run shop, the whole technique of the man game has changed. method, alas, had become as out of style as a pompadour Gibson hat. Where once
My
girls
pretended to know less and to have experienced less than they actually had, now they pretend to more. Therein lie all the law and the social
72
NONSENSEORSHIP
profits.
Therefore Rule
It
is
One
of these dauntless
rebels reads:
not an insult but a compliment
for an admirer to explain that his intentions are frankly carnivorous.
To my ten-year-old technique had
still
been cling-
ing the cobwebs of the past, when even Launcelot's intentions were painted as slightly honorable. But
now
the shades of Alfred
Lord Tennyson help
us! it has become the smart procedure to take Man's bold bad intentions right out into the conversation and pretend to be tempted by them. The truth of the matter is that those pseudo-
engagements of the fox-trot decade really were furnishing a charge account psychology.
close his eyes
Man
could
and
still
and whisper, "Some day, my own," 9 go nicely on a Ladies Home Journal
cover design of "Under the Mistletoe." But, when our flapper is not even pretending to him that she
going to marry him, and when he is not even pretending to himself that he is going to marry her well, the whole sex game has then been put on a
is
frank cash and carry basis. Mark well, however, these worldly-wise young things of this the third year of our Prohibition are
not necessarily
less virtuous technically
than their
own
crinolined grandmothers. Only these days they are not bragging about their virtue.
73
1STONSENSEOIISHIP
"And have
all
the
men
afraid of you, for fear
they'll be responsible for teaching you something," explains one practical miss. "Men like to find you
in stock, ready-taught.
We know how to take care
want."
we let them think what they the whole new game, as the earshort, nest disciple from the half generation ago learned it,
of ourselves
so
In
not to reveal the dark secret that you abide by the Ten Commandments. Man must not suspect that
is
you are unattainable. has not attained you

flapper
rules.
He must
yet.
just think that he If you want to comconversational

in-
pete with the flappers, you've got to play by the
Check your
hibitions !
And
if
by chance there be any
inhibitions left
over, Prohibition has obligingly introduced
new
opportunities for privacy, that will help you check
them
a couple strays off now from group formation, there's a perfectly good alibi available of finding a sheltered spot for a drink.
too.
When
Where
once
it
really wasn't
man's hotel room, now it the owner of hootch to

jewel
one.
good form to go to a is the national custom for register a casket for his
and then
invite the
young things
in,
one by
A flapper these nights can retire to that hotel

in the
bedroom for an hour

girl
is
middle of a dance.
is
The
not
not "talked about," and the place
NONSENSEORSHIP
"pulled."
is
Even the house

this rebel
detective
knows that she
innocently drinking a drink.
Thus has
into the
young generation forced out

it
open country with
all
the contented
young women
ties,
all.
in their late twenties
and early
thir-
feeling rebellious at the wives of forty-five also, to compete all And over again for their own husbands. For "poach-
who may not have been
ing" on the wifely preserves has become the favorite

flapper sport!
"Married men," having been forbidden to unmarried young persons for three chaste generations,
our flappers, bi-product of inhibition, are promptly appropriating the husbands. This one item of the
flapper raid on the married men has done more than the entire twentieth century put together to change
the
smug
structure of
American
society,
and bring
us back to normalcy. Before 1865 no Southern belle considered herself
worth her salt unless all the courtly old married men in the country kissed her hand and competed with
the
young blades
for her quadrilles.
But when
black persons stopped buttoning up the shoes of the Quality, America entered upon her 1870's, her
sombre brown stone fronts, and her

bands.
cloistered hus-
for doing society had simply passed into the hands of the descendants of Miles
75
The money
NONSENSEORSHIP
Standish and Priscilla,
sciences into their sober
who
carried
their
con-
mansions with them. The

has clung close
Age of Innocence was upon us, and

ever since.
that fatal day on to 1917 each oncoming debutante was taught by her mother to give unto the genus, married man, her most impersonal manner, lest she
From
provoke
his "undesirable attentions."

it
If poaching was done,
Unmarried
somebody
girls
else's
knew home
that their place in those days.
was from behind a tree. was not in The wives
could protect their preserves by the simple expedient of "talking about" any unmarried young
female caught on the married reservations.
And
were worth marrying, somebody promptly marries him. The Fast Young Married Crowd was a closed corporation and played exclusively within itself; the female of the species had to compete only with The only sylph-like females of equal tonnage.
to pass that the pick of the men posted, because, as fast as a callow youth gets
so
it
came
temptation that a husband could encounter was a dissolute person whose reputation had already been
ruined
and she didn't count, because nobody
in-
wife could get as vited her to parties anyway. fat as she wanted to in those days.
Even today
that same leisurely 76
life
might
exist
NONSENSEORSHIP
the wives might be resting their feet under the bridge tables, secure in the consciousness that no bobbed haired young poacher
for the wives.
Even today
was daring to dance with their husbands, if they had just let prohibitions enough alone if they had
only not been swept away by the high sport of gossiping about our Wild Young People, which struck the country in the summer of 1920. This gossip was an intrinsic phase of the virtue wave which
always immediately precedes a crime wave. The wives just at this point, instead of sitting tight, made the strategic mistake of turning the full
ammunition of gossip, which should have been saved for defending husbands from poachers, into an offensive attack on the flapper's lip stick, on her cigarettes, and on her petting parties. Whenever two or three wives were gathered together, their topic was our Wild Young People. That summer, too, saw the launching of that now seasoned romance about the checking of corsets. The resolutions at clubs were being resolved. The preachers were sermonizing. The up-state legislators were drafting bills against flappers' smoking
force of the
cigarettes.
Human
nature can be pushed just so far.
In-
stead of reforming, the young things apparently decided one might as well lose a reputation for
77
NONSENSEORSHIP
stealing a husband as for smoking a cigarette. The whole arsenal for combating poachers blew up.
To make matters
virtue
worse, in the excitement of the
wave our Wild Young People had been attacked as a group instead of as individuals. That was the second mistake. The whole strength of
gossip consists in selecting one member of the clan for calumny, to stand out disgraced and alone
Because the flappers had been gossiped about en masse, the whole reason for not being gossiped about had ceased. The
among her exemplary
sisters.
poacher of that half generation ago had been the kind of a girl who stalked her game alone.
the girls in town are seeking to steal your husband, what are you going to do about it, if you are a woman of forty-five with a heaviness
all
But, when
around the hips and a disinclination to learn the camel walk? Nor can you get the poachers off the
by crossing the trail with an eligible bachelor. Logically, the young things should have enough sense to ignore a preempted husband and attend to
scent
the serious business of getting themselves husbands. But they haven't. They seem to prefer the hus-
bands of the other women.
And
curiously, the
more they engage
in this exotic sport of poaching,
the less keen they become about owning a property for somebody else to poach on.
78
NONSENSEORSHIP
The real interstate joke on Puritanism is that the flapper, who flaps because Puritanism has driven
her to
it,
will automatically bring

vitality of
about
its
cure.
The whole
Puritanism rests on the unthy left hand is Puritanism could
swerving principle of letting not thy right hand
know what thy
left
hand doeth,
if
doing something it shouldn't. not last out a week-end without the able assistance
of the standardized double
life.
And
spect.
that
is
They
just what the flappers refuse to reare even insisting on being taken
along on the parties, which, by all the rules of Rolf and Comstock should be confined to man's double life. Where the chorus lady was once the only brand that had the proper and improper equipment to jazz up an evening, now mankind has come to
prefer the flapper,
who
drinks as
much
as the
Broadwayite,
is
just as
peppy and not
quite so
gold-diggish. "It is so simple," smiles Barbara nonchalantly
blowing her smoke rings.
an impossible standard.
"You old dears set man As he had always to be
pretending holy emotions whenever he was around you he just naturally had to get away half the time,
to rest the muscles of his inhibitions.
Why, you
funny old things actually drove man into his double life, just as you made all of his best stories have two
79
NOISTSENSEORSHIP
editions,
one for a nice

nice.
one not so
and one for well say Our crowd has done more than all
girl
of your silly old social hygiene commissions to bring nearer the single standard by going part way to
meet him."
The
rail
preachers are wasting their time when they that the flappers are painting their faces like
women." Of course they are painting them that way for the very good reason that mankind
"fallen
has demonstrated too unmistakably that that kind of woman has "a way with her."
Not so long ago cosmetics became a moral issue. The curl rag was the only beautifier that somehow
never lost
less
odor of sanctity and that was doubtbecause curl rags were a perfectly logical part
its
ization.
of the long-sleeved Canton flannel nightgown civilCurls couldn't be so very wrong when they
were so frightfully unbecoming in the making. And so the "good woman" handed over intact to her weaker sister every beautifier that the world had
been eight thousand years accumulating.
Slowly, timidly the allurements returned. The talcum powder bought for baby surreptitiously
reached the nose.
When
the half generation ago

certain lip salve, just
was young, we had adopted a
one shade darker than the way lips come, explaining, to save our reputations, that we were keeping
80
NONSENSEORSHIP
from chapping. Rouge too had come coyly; back but and here's the gist of the whole matin polite society paint was put on to imitate ter
our
lips
nature.
We
were
ducted his
doing our make-up as man condouble life with intent to deceive the
still
general public.
belonged at heart to the Puritan era, in spite of our wicked fox-trot. All may have been artificial below the neck, from our
still
We
Gossard corsets with

our hobble tended
it
skirts.
phalanx of garters on to But above the neck, we pretheir
was
natural.
The flapper has changed all that. She has turned the lady up side down, as well as the world. For the flapper is au naturale below the neck. Above
the neck she
the most artificially and entertainingly painted creature that has graced society since? Queen Elizabeth. With one bold stroke of a pasis
sionately red lip stick, she has painted out Elaine the Fair and the later-day noble Christie Girl and
painted in an exotic young person, meet to compete alike with a Ziegfield show girl, with a heaven-
born Egyptian princess or even a good Queen Bess,
who could not move her

up
for the morning.
face after
it
was dressed
And
Bess was the Virgin
Queen.
only era
The American- Victorian is indeed the in history when cosmetics became a moral
81
NONSENSEORSHIP
dour Cromwellian England, rouge registered the wrong politics but not immorality. are merely getting back to normalcy in cosissue.
Even
in
We
era.
metics
back behind the dun wall of the Victorian
the flapper who has done it for us. What's more, she has done it frankly and purposeit
And
is
because the reformer, in his naive innocence, has explained to her that what she is doing is wicked
fully
Similarly those of 'em who had not yet taken off their corsets at dances, promptly did so when shocked elders began
and
will get that
kind of "results."
repeating the corset checking story. Dear heart, the only reason that they had not done so before was because the little dears hadn't heard that the
worst people were using ribs instead of whalebone

that season.
Vice would die out from disuse, did not advertise.
if
the reformers
82
FREDERICK O'BRIEN FINOS THE SOUTH SEAS PURIFIED AND BEAUTIFIED BY THE MISSIONARIES
THE WOWZER IN THE SOUTH SEAS

FREDERICK O'BRIEN
ALL over the South Seas the censor has had his day. From New Guinea to Easter Island, he has
made
and enforced them. Often he wrote glowing pages of prose and poetry about his accomplishments, for reading in Europe and
his rules
America.
He was usually sincere, and determined.

was up
He
felt that it
tive races to suit
God and
himself.
him to make over the nahis own ideas of what pleased When he had the lower hand,
to
he prayed and strove in agony to change the wicked

hearts of his flock to
Clapham or Andover
stand-
ards; he suffered the contumelies of heathen jibes, and now and again often enough to make a car-
toon popular he was hotpotted or baked on hot stones as a "long pig." When he converted the
king or chief, and he always directed his sacred ammunition at the upper classes, he took advantage of
every inch of spiritual and governmental club put in his hand, and smote the pagan hip and thigh.
83
NONSENSEORSHIP
His
sole effort
was to make the South Seas

It
is
safe for
theocracy,
Of
if
and to strafe Satan. course, he was a missionary.
doubtful
any other urge than a religious one could have infused into those canny migrants of the past century the extraordinary zeal that characterized their
singular labors in the exquisite and benighted of the tropics.
isles
leave the melancholy and futuristic atmosphere of seminaries and bethels where the ghosts and penalties of millions of sins cast down their
hearts,
To
where few baths and drab
clothes,
dark
homes and poor food, made all conscious of dwelling in a vale of tears, and after half a year or more of hard, ship fare and the rough discipline of a tossing windjammer, to find themselves in the most magnificent scenes on the globe, and amid the richest bounty, was trial enough of the unstable soul of man. That they most of them resisted
the temptations of the tropical demon, that they continued to preach fire and brimstone, to remain
frocked and shod, pantaletted and stayed, is proof enough of their cementation to the rock of ages. The men were even subjected to direr spells.
youths, the rude boys of farm and hamschooled in simple studies, untried by the wiles let, of siren blandishments. If married, their court-
They were
84
NONSENSEORSHIP
had been without passion, and their wedded years without competition, and generally without
ships
other incidents than children.
A typical union of this kind I find in an old diary

of the wife of one of the most famous propagandists of the American God in Polynesia. He was of
Yale and Andover, and she of Bradford, the daughShe was twenty-four ter of a Marlboro deacon. and he a little older when her cousin called upon her at her Marlboro home, to ask if she would "become connected with a missionary now an entire stranger, attach herself to a little band of pilgrims, and visit the distant land of Hawaii."
"What could I say? thoroughly discussed the subject. Next week is the anticipated, dreaded interview of final decision. Last night I could
neither eat nor close
We
my eyes in sleep."
"The
early hours of the evening
so-
The
suitor came.
were devoted to refreshments, to free family

ciality, to singing,
and to evening worship.
Then
one by one the family dispersed, leaving two of similar aspirations, introduced as strangers, to
separate at midnight as interested friends. "In the forenoon, the sun had risen high in the heavens, when it looked down upon two of the chil-
dren of earth giving themselves wholly to their

heavenly Father, receiving each other from his hand
85
NONSENSEORSHIP
as his good gift, pledging themselves to each other as close companions in the race of life, consecrating themselves and their all to a life-work among the
heathen."
After
six
months on the wave, she approaches
the "land of darkness whither I
am
bound.
When
I reflect on the degradation and misery of the inhabitants, follow them into the eternal world, and
forward to the great day of retribution, petty sufferings dwindle to a point."
all
my
They
sexes
anchor, and "soon the islanders of both
came paddling out in their canoes, with their island fruit. The men wore girdles, and the women a slight piece of cloth wrapped around them, from the hips downward. To a civilized eye their cover-
But we ing seemed to be revolt ingly scanty. learned that it was a full dress for daily occupation." The note of nudity this really remarkable woman struck at her first sight of the welcoming savages,
was the keynote of the new domination of the islands from Hawaii to Australia. The censors were convinced that it was a state of ungodliness. Their reasoning was based on the fig leaf tied about them by the first man and woman when they became conscious of sin, and it proceeded to the logical
teaching that the less of the body exposed the

86
NONSENSEORSHIP
more godly the
condition. When they found this nakedness associated with a relation of the sexes
utterly opposed to their own, and when, especially, the first white wives on the South Sea beaches,
found the joyous, handsome, frolicsome women of

the islands,
making ardent
love to their husbands,
the innate heinousness of bodily bareness became fixed as a guiding star towards bringing the infidel
to the true worship.
Clothe them and sanctify them, became the motto. From the wondrous Marquesas valleys to
the American naval station of Samoa, the bonnet,
the bonnet of a half century ago, is the requirement of decency in the coral or bamboo church, as it is in
the temples of
New
York.
The nightgown
or
Mother Hubbard of Connecticut became the proper female attire for natives in the house of God, and
thus,
by gradual establishment of a fashion, in their straw homes, and everywhere. Chief esses were induced to don calico, and chiefs the woolen or denim
trousers of refinement.
The
trader
came
to sell
them, and
so business followed the Bible.
Tattoo-
ing, which, with the Polynesians
and Melenesians,
was probably a race memory of clothing in a less tropical clime, was condemned bitterly by the white censors as causing nudity. man or woman whose legs and body were covered with marvellous ara-
87
NONSENSEORSHIP
besques and gaudy pictures of palms and not apt to hide them under garments.
fish
was
And here the censor also had an ally in the trader.

joined, unwittingly, to break down both the old morale of the pagan and the new morality
The two
of the converts.
The
censorious cleric said that the

or,
Lord
disliked nakedness,
at least,
that un-
clothedness
was unvirtuous, while the
seller of calico
and alcohol advised the purchase of

the sake of style.
his
goods for
He
ridiculed tattooing
and
nudity, but he also laughed with ribaldry at the religious arguments. The confused indigene, driven
by admonition and shame put on the hot and griming stuffs, and finally, had them kept on him by statute. The censor in the South Seas achieved his highest reach of holy effort. He had made into law the mores his sect or tribe had coined into morals, and was able to punish by civil tribunal the evildoers
who refused
here, old
it
to abide
by
his conception of the
divine wish.
But
the world
Mother Nature revolted. All over would appear that she is not in touch
with the divinity that shapes the ends of the censors. The clothing donned by the natives of the South
Seas killed them.

foul
;
They sweated and remained

;
they swam, and kept on their garments they were rained on, and laid down in calico and wool.
NONSENSEORSHIP
They abandoned the games and exercises which had made them the finest physical race in the world, and took up hymn books and tools. The physical
plagues of the whites decimated them.
They
passed away The censored returned to the rich earth which had
as the tiare Tahiti withers indoors.
bred them, and taught them its secrets and demands. Only a mournful remnant remains to observe the censorship. But the curious spirit of inversion which tries to
make
had
the assumed infinite of a finite nature, which
a race to an invented god, persists even in the South Seas. One of the most distinsacrificed
guished authors,
who has chosen
that delectable
clime for his researches was arrested for napping
on his own paepae partly clothed. The parson informed upon him, and the gendarme fined him. In the British South Seas, where I was recently, pro-
had cast a blight upon the more poetical whites. I remember one night when my vessel was anchored for a few hours in the roadstead of a
hibition
lonely island, a group of civil servants and a minister of the Church of England had come aboard to
buy what comforts they might from our civilized caravan. They sat on deck clinking glasses occasionally, talking of cities
where a
man might
be
freed from the "continuous spying of the uncoo 89
NONSENSEORSHIP
good."
that
That was the phrase they used, being English or Scots, and when the word was passed
we up-anchored with
the turn of the tide at
midnight, they sang in a last burst of lively furor a song of Dionysian regret. One stanza lingers with
me:
Whack
the cymbal!
Bang
the drum!
Votaries of Bacchus!
Let the popping corks resound, Pass the flowing goblet round! May no mournful voice be found, Though wowzers do attack us
!
In the darkness I
called to
them
as they
down
"
5
the
gangway
into their boat,
went "What is a
wowzer?"
E's a bloomin'
'oo
wants to do unto
'imself."
others
wot 'e's The wowzers are more
bleedin' well done to
active in Hawaii, the
most
temperate portion of Polynesia, than in the Maori law passed at the last sesisles of New Zealand.
sion of the
Hawaiian
legislature prohibits
"any
person over fourteen years of age from appearing
upon the streets of Honolulu in a bathing suit unless covered suitably by an outer garment reaching at least to the knees." There is a ferment in Honolulu
over the arrest and punishment of offenders against this new censorship. It is the result of the control
90
NONSENSEORSHIP
by the
the
spiritual, or perhaps, lineal,
descendants of
first
children of those
South Sea censors, of the great grandmen who wore the girdles of leaves
at the landing of the
Marlboro school teacher a
hundred years ago. The girdle-wearers are members of the Hawaiian legislature soon to be succeeded by Japanese-native-born and the censors,
wives of financiers and sugar factors. Again the feeble remnant of the Hawaiian race voted against the girdle.
likely, are
A friend of mine, grandson of the estimable missionary and his bride of the New England of a century ago, thus comments upon the law in a paper
sent to
me:
which caused the passage of the law were, that
The
facts
certain residents of Waikiki were donning their bathing suits at home, walking across and along the public streets to the sea
and returning
to this
1
in the
same
state of undress.
had been of the old-style no objection The woman's bathing suit of the olden days were a cumbrous swaddling garment, highbloomer-breeched and full-skirted, necked, long-sleeved,
If the bathing suits
would have been made.
stockinged.
Simultaneously with the outbreak of the street parade era, above noted, there came with spontaneous-combustion-like rapidity, a radical change in the style of female bathing suits
"on the
street at Waikiki."
First the sleeves, then the stockings, then the skirts, then the main portion of the garment covering the legs, successively
91
NONSENSEORSHIP
suit
disappeared, until the low-necked, sleeveless, legless one-piece became "the thing" ; and women clad in garments scantier
than the scantiest on the ballet stage, were parading Kalakaua avenue in the vicinity of the Moana hotel, to the scandal and
disgust of some; the devouring gaze of others; and the interested inspection of whomsoever chose to inspect!
startling sight to the uninitiated probably unin any other civilized country. duplicated The South Pacific or the heart of Africa would probably
It
was a
have to be visited to find virtuous women so scantily clad, making such exhibition of their persons in public more particularly
on the public
streets.
became the subject of protest, of of discussion in press, in public and in private justification, throughout the community.
This! scantiness of dress
The practice was violently attacked as tending to lewdness and scandal; as vigorously defended as a question of personal taste and liberty, and as a matter concerning safety and comfort in
swimming.
Those
"old-style suits" he refers to, "full-skirted,
bloomer-breeched" were the godly ones brought to Hawaii by the censors, but which gradually dis-
appeared with the influx of rich tourists from America, and the importation by Honolulu merchants of the flimsier and less concealing kind. This new generation of whites that has sought
escape from the "cumbrous, swaddling garment" embraces the flapper, who at Waikiki is a beautiful
and wholesome
sight.
Browned by years
92
of expos-
ure to the beach sun, charmingly modelled, and with
NONSENSEORSHIP
the grace and freedom of limb of the surf -board rider and canoeist, she has no consciousness of
guilt in her
emergence dripping from the sea, in her lying in the breeze upon the sand, nor in her walks to and from her bungalow nearby. And she refuses to be censored.
proprietor of the oldest newspaper in the islands, and himself a noted diplomat,
The commentator,
lawyer and revolutionist

Liliuokalani
says so:
he took up a
rifle
against
The law has been observed by a
few, ignored by a few, and
caricatured by the many. It is not an uncommon thing to see a woman walking the streets in Waikiki in the scantiest of
bathing suits, with drapery of the flimsiest suspended from her shoulders and floating behind upon the breeze.
to
made a few feeble and spasmodic attempts observance of the law, with some ill-advised persuade attempts to enforce individual ideas of propriety on the beach
police have
itself.
The
On
its
the whole, the law
is
either
openly and
flagrantly
violated or rendered farcical
by the contemptuous
manner of
semi-observance.
And,
first
cautiously but firmly, the grandson of the missionaries to Hawaii, himself living six
decades in Honolulu, a church member and supporter of all evangelical and commercial progress,
gives advice to the people of his territory. Urging that those opposed to the bathing suit law try
93
NONSENSEORSHIP
legally to secure its repeal, but that all obey while it is on the statute books, he says
:
it
As to the question of attire on the beach, there are modest and immodest women to be found everywhere, regardless of
their clothes.
It is impossible to legislate
it is
son who
is
innately immodest, and
and do
so.
The
attire of a
woman
modesty into a pertherefore useless to try on the beach at Waikiki
as well as her conduct elsewhere, should therefore be left to
the individual
woman
herself.
of a very shrewd, wealthy, experienced, religious son of censors. But wowzerism dies hard in America or in the South Seas.
is
That
the last
word
The Anglo-Saxon American
has
it
in his blood as
an inheritance from the rise of Puritanism four hundred years ago, while with many it is an idiosyncrasy to be explained by the glands regulating personality. In fact, I feel that this is the enemy
the would-be free must fight. extirpate the wowzerary gland.
We must attack and
DOROTHY PARKER HATING REFORMERS
REFORMERS: A
HYMN OF HATE
DOROTHY PARKER
I hate
Reformers}
raise
They
my
blood pressure.
There are the Prohibitionists;
The Fathers of Bootlegging. They made us what we are to-day

hope they're satisfied. They can prove that the Johnstown
I
flood,
And the blizzard of 1888, And the destruction of Pompeii Were all due to alcohol.
They have
it
figured out
That anyone who would give a gin daisy a friendly look

Is just wasting time out of jail,
And anyone who would

With a
stay under the same roof
bottle of Scotch
Is right in line for a cozy seat in the electric chair. They fixed things all up pretty for us ;
Now
that they have dried
up the country,
You can hardly get a drink unless you go in and order one. They are in a nasty state over this light wines and beer idea; They say that lips that touch liquor
Shall never touch wine.
They swear
that the Eighteenth
Amendment
Shall be improved upon
95
NONSENSEORSHIP
Over
their
dead bodies
!
Fair enough Then there are the Suppressors of Vice The Boys Who Made the Name of Cabell a Household Word.
;
Their aim
is
to
keep art and
letters in their place;
If they see a book
Which does not come
right out and say That the doctor brings babies in his little black bag, Or find a painting of a young lady Showing her without her rubbers, They call out the militia.
They have a mean eye for dirt; They can find it In a copy of "What Katy Did at School/' Or a snapshot of Aunt Bessie in bathing at Sandy Creek, Or a picture postcard of Moonlight in Bryant Park.
are always running around suppressing things, Beginning with their desires.
They
They get a lot of excitement out of life, They are constantly discovering The New Rabelais Or the Twentieth Century Hogarth.
Their leader
is
regarded
As
the representative of Comstock here on earth. How does that song of Tosti's go?
"Good-bye, Sumner, good-bye, good-bye."
There are the Movie Censors,
The motion
picture is still in its infancy, are the boys who keep it there. They If the film shows a party of clubmen tossing off ginger ale, Or a young bride dreaming over tiny garments,
Or Douglas Fairbanks kissing Mary They cut out the scene

96
Pickford's hand,
NONSENSEORSHIP
And burn
They
fix
it
in the public square.

all
up
the historical events
So that
their
own mothers wouldn't know them.

like brother
And show
They make Du Barry Mrs. Louis Fifteenth, that Anthony and Cleopatra were
sister,
and
And announce
Salome's engagement to John the Baptist, So that the audiences won't go and get ideas in their headu They insist that Sherlock Holmes is made to say,
"Quick, Watson, the crochet needle
!"
And
the state pays them for it. They say they are going to take the sin out of cinema
If they perish in the attempt,

I wish to
God
they would
And
then there are the All-American Crabs;

Little
The Brave
Band
that
is
Against Everything.
a girl.
They have got up the idea That things are not what they were when Grandma was They say that they don't know what we're coming to, As if they had just written the line.
They
are always running a temperature
Over the modern dances,
Or Or
the
new
skirts,
the goings-on of the younger set.

in
They can barely hold themselves
When
They
they think of the menace of the drama; seem to be going ahead under the idea
Was
That everything but the Passion Play written by Avery Hopwood.
They
will never feel really themselves
Until every theatre in the country is razed. They are forever signing petitions
Urging that cigarette-smokers should be deported, 97
NONSENSEORSHIP
And And
that all places of amusement should be closed on kept closed all week.
Sunday
They take everything They go about shaking
personally;
their heads,
it's all
And
sighing, "It's all wrong,
wrong,"
They
said
it.
I hate
Reformers;
They
raise
my
blood pressure.
98
FRANK SWINNERTON CONTEMPLATING, FROM THE TIGHT LITTLE ISLE, THE TWO CLASSES OF PRIGS DEVELOPED BY PROHIBITION; THOSE WHO ACCEPT AND THOSE WHO REBEL
PROHIBITION
FRANK SWINNERTON
I shall never forget the shock I received
when an
American woman, newly arrived in England, gave me her impressions of London. She was distinctly pleased with the town, and when I rather foolishly asked if she had been terrified by our celebrated policemen, she said, "Why, no. I was in a taxicab yesterday, and the driver went right on past the policeman's hand, stealing round where he'd no
business to go.
land?'
And the policeman just said,

in
'Here,
where you going?
Why,
D'you want the whole of EngNew York, if he'd done that, he'd
dis-
have been in prison inside of five minutes!" I wonder if it will be understood how terrible
illusion
I had been thinking of the United States for so long as the home of the
scale
on such a
can
be.
was hard to bring myself to the belief that the police there were both peremptory and severe. I had thought them all Irishmen of the humorous, or "darlint" type. It seems I was
free
it
and the easy that
mistaken.
The
little
am now
99
afraid misleading
NONSENSEORSHIP
paragraphs which from time to time appear in the English papers, saying that there has been a
hold-up on Fifth Avenue, or that the Chief of Police in some great city has been found to be the
head of a gang of international
assassins, that
things called Tammany and graft and saloons flourish there without let or hindrance, had attracted
United States. I wanted to live in such a country. Here, I said, is a place where every man's hand is for himself, where the revolver plays its true part, and where, with the aid of a
to the
me
humorous
policeman, who will find me stunned by a sandbag and take me to his little home in 244th Street and reveal the fact that he is deIrish
scended from Cuchulain, I can be happy. At first I thought that my friend must be exaggerating. Not lightly was I prepared to let my
dream go. But I am afraid that my confidence in America as the home of freedom needs a tonic. She
may
able.
have been right, although it seems unbelievWhen I thought the problem out clearly I
to the conclusion that there
came
was a
sinister
sound about that comment upon our policemen.
Were
they losing control of us? Apparently not. I had trouble on the road with a policeman over the rear light of my car. There is no doubt that England
is efficiently
policed. 100
And
so
my mind
stole
back to America with a new uneasiness. I recollected tales which I had heard about sumptuary
laws regulating the dress of American women, both in and out of the water. I saw the police invading
and snatching cigarettes from the mouths of women. I saw drink being driven underrestaurants
ground by Prohibition.
began to
question
whether I should really like to live in the United States after all. I asked those of my friends who
had been to America.
They
told
me
that
if
I visited America I should
be regaled privately with champagne from the huge reserves of private wine-cellars, but that as a resi-
dent I should be forbidden to drink anything that enlivened me. It was a great shock. I am not yet
recovered from
it.
I see that I shall after
all
have
to live quietly in
England with
my
abstemious bottle of beer.

to visit America, for
And
pipe and my yet I should like
it has suddenly become in my an enormous country of "Don't!" and I imagining want to know what it is like to have "Don't" said by somebody who is not a woman. I have always hated the word "Don't." I hated it as a child, and I hate it still. It is a nasty word, a
word, associated with feelings of resentment, of discipline, of prohibition. Yes, that is it, of course, Prohibition. I find that it is Prohibition
chilling
101
NONSENSEORSHIP
which makes
my throat
it
so dry.
I thought
said,
it
was a
human
characteristic,
when anybody
"You're
not to do that!" to do
at once in case there should
be any misunderstanding. I should be frightened to say "Don't!" to anybody, because I feel sure it
would precipitate unpleasantness. Is America so different from the rest of the world that it likes
having "Don't!" said to
it?
I cannot think that.
What
worked out of
America has not yet the strain that the English system Puritan fathers brought with them. It is a melanoccurs to
is
me
that
its
choly thought to me that it is really ancient English repression that is responsible for the present state
I feel very guilty, particularly as I have seen an article about myself in an English newspaper headed "A Modern Puritan." It is really I,
of affairs.
and people
like
restrictions in
me, who have caused the great drink the United States. I bow my head.
The truth is, I suppose, that people in the United States take life more seriously than we do in
England. If you read any of the books which have been written in this country during the ages to show
what sort of community is the ideal I refer to such works as "Utopia" and "News from Nowhere" there is never any difference between them on one
All the dwellers in these ideal states appear to be thoroughly idle. They have practically no
point.
102
NONSENSEORSHIP
work to do at
all.
All their time
is
spent in talk and
sylvan wandering, with music and dancing round maypoles. There is no mistaking the fact that the
able laziness.
Englishman's idea of life is confirmed and He wants what he calls

Charles
justifi-
leisure.
Lamb, a
typically English author, wrote a

first
poem beginning "Who

came
firms
Devil.
invented work?"
it
He
to the conclusion that
must have been the

Observation con-
The
inference
is
clear.
my
view.
It
is
not to be doubted that the

life in
average Englishman spends his
scheming to
nearest to
make somebody
his hand.
else
do the work that

different.
lies
Americans must be
really like
I believe they
I will give the Prohibitionists this handsome admission. I also work much
better without stimulants.
work.
And
I mean,
much
harder.
But on the other hand, I am less happy. Does an American feel happy in his work? Does the act of work give him a satisfaction which is not felt by an Englishman ? I think that must be the explanation. But on the other hand there is this question of Puritanism. We tried it in England, and we had
a severe reaction to libertinism.
We
maintain
Puritanism only in our suburban

there
is
districts,
where
exceedingly close scrutiny of all matters pertaining to conduct and in our theatres. In the
;
103
NONSENSEORSHIP
matter, although it rather cramps our suburban style; but in the theatre it I will explain drives some of us to distraction.
it
suburbs
does not
much
why.
Supposing a
man wants
to write a play, he at
once thinks of getting it produced. An unproduced play is like an unpublished novel: practically
speaking
it
does not exist.

his wife
The author can read

it is
it,
of course, and
can assure him that
great deal better than anything she has seen or read for years; but the author and his wife are both
haunted by the fact that there is a masterpiece which is lying not fallow, but unused and sterile.
They grow
for them.
dissatisfied.
The savour
of life
is
lost
They develop
and
very conceited,
persecution mania, grow finally come to believe that only
they of all the men and women alive truly grasp the essentials of life. They say, if this were the
muck that most authors write, it would be produced, and then we should have our car and our
silly
servants and diamonds and titles
and
phernalia of happiness.
silence
As
it is,
we
the paraare doomed to

all
and poverty, simply because George is too much of an artist to lower himself by writing what the public wants, and what the censor will pass.
For I have not been outlining the diseased state of mind of the merely incompetent man who writes
104
NONSENSEORSHIP
something that nobody will look at. I have been giving details of one of those men who have a moral
message, and
who
stage.
desire greatly to spread
it
by
means of the
He
play in which the
name
has written, let us say, a of God appears, or a play
wherein a young woman has a baby and does not wish to have a husband. The censor says that there
must be no mention of God in plays performed on the public stage, and that young women who have babies must either have husbands or come to early graves of their own seeking. Very well, what happens? I have described the state of mind of a husband and wife who have a pet child a play which is lying heavy on their minds and hearts and hands.
They
And
are ripe for any temptation of the devil. it comes. It always comes.
devil dresses himself
The
up
in the guise of a
Sunday play-producing
reptitiously
society.
The play
is
sur-
performed in a theatre to which admission can be obtained only by members banded
together for just such emergencies. It is very badly acted by actors and actresses who have not been
able to spare sufficient time from their daily work to learn their parts as well as they should have
done.
The audience comes

and
select,
full of
it is
it
smug
self-
satisfaction at the thought that

tellectual
and that
105
excessively inalone can appre-
NONSENSEORSHIP
blasphemy or the vagaries of neurotic young women. It sits intellectually in the theatre, and
ciate
watches the play.

his box,
The author
sits
intellectually in
and
intellectually accepts the plaudits of
the audience.
lectual atmosphere.
He lives thereafter in a highly intelHe is driven to become a mem-
ber of the secret play-producing society, and to watch other plays of a character not suited to the
requirements of the censorship. He is morally a ruined man. He will never any more be a decent
of society, for he has become an intellectual. He has been taught to despise ordinary human beings, for they do not want to be wicked or
silly, except in the normal humdrum way, and they have not seen his play and are not members of his
member
He discovers that the censored is the only good art. He is driven to the reading of all sorts of Continental drama. He is made into an anti-English propagandist. He is
play-producing society.
like the
person in the song,

his
who
"Praises every century but this, and every country but
own."
He has been lost for human kind,

for the rest of his miserable
life.
and is wedded to and a sense of superiority to others intellectualism
He
institutes
new system
of censorship of his own.

106
It takes the
form of sneering at and condemning anything that
NONSENSEORSHIP
does not conform to his
sorts of innocently
own
ideas.
He sniffs at all
inoffen-
happy people who are
pursuing their noisy course through life. He begins to hate noise. He makes a virtue of his
sively
abstention from ordinary pleasures. speaks condescendingly of the "hoi polloi." As I said, he
is
He
ruined.
He
is
no longer a
man
that one can talk
to with
any comfort, for

there
is
his sense of superiority is
intolerable.
nothing more terrible than the sense of superiority to others. It arises, not from
merit or the consciousness of merit, but from sheer
tin-like flimsiness of character.
To me
ited sympathies.
The
man,
really
is
from limgreat man, and the

It arises
really sagacious
one to
whom
follies
nothing
is
contemptible.
To
him, even the
of his fel-
low-passengers are manifestations of human nature, revelations of the material from which
scholars
and
politicians
no
less
than drunkards and
inconstants are gradually in course of time developed. Somebody described "conceit" to me the
other day as egotism in which contempt for others is involved. It was agreed between us that egotism
was normal,
since happiness is not to be attained without a sense of personal utility to the world, and
no objection was urged against it. Vanity was to be tolerated, because it was definitely social a
107
NONSENSEORSHIP
recognition of the existence and value of the good opinion of others; but never sense of superiority.
And
the sense of rebellion should be added to this
other sense, as equally to be regretted. young woman whose incredible acts of folly had spoiled half-a-dozen lives, including her own, recently en-
countered a young man whom she had jilted on the eve of her marriage to another, whom she had also
left.
The young man,
still
smarting under his
ill-
treatment, reproached her.
He
said,
"What you
want,
my
dear,
is
discipline."
"Pooh!" she an-
swered.
"I'm above
discipline!"
man
retired, unequal to the conversation.
The poor young But the

and
self-
young woman went on her way,
defiant
infatuated, believing that she really was superior to the opinions of others, the common decencies of
conduct, the inevitable give and take of ordinary life. Driven to folly by lack of balance, she was
learning to justify her folly by the argument for rebellion. Whether she will ever learn to control
her actions I do not know, but rebelliousness from a feeling that one is too good to be governed by nor-
mal standards
is silly.
is
It
is,
not only arrogant and unsocial. It to my mind, a criminal form of silli-
one very widely accepted by the young and the unimaginative. It must therefore be recognized and combated.
ness.
it is
But
108
NONSENSEORSHIP
It
springs,
perhaps,
from disordered shame,
which makes children noisily act in defiance of

authority, particularly if there are others present to overhear. No children are worse-behaved than
those
who are
over-controlled.
The word
"don't"
at the breakfast-table produces more acts of violent rebellion than any amount of parental weakness.
Unimaginativeness begets unimaginativeness. Rigidity in one person creates a counter-rigidity in the
a thwarting upon both sides, a mutual shackle upon sweetness and understanding.
other.
There
is
A wildness
of action arises, with loss of affection,
the vicious part of it is that children (we are all children, for we never grew up in human relations), once they are emrespect, self-respect.
And
barked upon an
driven by vanity to continue upon that course until they are exhausted,
evil course, are
going from defiance to defiance; and ultimately building up a whole sophisticated gospel of axioms
whereby rebellion
given warrant and virtue. The gospel of rebellion we know to be specious and without justification; but it is essential to us, as
is
human
acts.
beings, to maintain self-approval for our
we cannot do this socially, by comparative standards, we do it unsocially, by subversion of

If
those standards.
side
Rebels are only prigs turned up109
down
or inside out.
NONSENSEORSHIP
great defect of prohibition is that when it can be enforced by law it makes rebels who think
The
something inconceivably clever in doing sethat which the law forbids. They learn to cretly think there is some subtle merit in evading the law.
is
there
They encourage
tions.
others to break the law, and so
develop cliques and finally new and silly convenOr, prohibition has another effect. It makes
class
a whole
who
accept
its
rulings,
and gradually
these people, owing to a peculiarity which all gregarious animals seem to have, begin to believe that
unless all are of their persuasion and of their number the fault lies with the rebels. First of all they
consider themselves superior to the rebels, and despise them. Then, when they find that the rebels
think that they are the superior class, in defying the law or the convention, a new set of notions
arises,
and
this set of notions leads to persecution
and to war.
cannot introduce any restrictive or prohibitive measure without developing fanatical conceit, narrow-mindedness, and intolerance, both
in those
You
who welcome
the measure and in those
who
seek to ignore and even to defy its rulings. The Puritanical attitude is almost wholly repressive, and naturally invokes force to aid its repressive
measures.
It did so in
England
centuries ago in
the matter of the theatre, and

110
we
are living
among
NONSENSEORSHD?
the rotten plays which have been written since, and the theatre is for the most part a place of ignoall
minious diversion.
The play-producing
societies
have nothing to produce that is worth producing, because the atmosphere which causes such plays as
are written to be produced privately
is
not the
healthy atmosphere from which masterpieces arise. It is an atmosphere impregnated with priggishness and a sense of superiority. It is an atmosphere, if
there can be such a thing, of sterility. The same thing happens in other matters, and I do not feel at
all certain
that
you say men classes. There
not happen with drink. If are not to drink you create two new
it
may
is
does not care for drink and
of course the existing class that is afraid of its effects
to the point of wishing to keep it away from those who do like drink. That class already flourishes in
most communities, and so I do not place it among any two classes which are created by the prohibition. The two classes are as follows the class that submits, and gradually develops priggishness and
self-satisfaction at
being in the majority, and the
class that rebels, and gradually develops priggishness and self-satisfaction at being in the minority. Both classes are objectionable, and I do not know
which
is
the worse.
They
111
are both inevitable in a

if
world of prohibitions, and
the United States, to
NONSENSEORSHIP
looking as the real hope for intelligent civilization, is going to take away our beer and turn us into supporters of play-producing societies
all
which we are
I cannot think what will happen to the world. Better a wicked world than a virtuous one. Better
a world in which we can hope that there are people worse than ourselves than a world where we know
that there cannot be
any
better.
112
sfY\
V
( \
'
.-*?
i
H. M.
TOMLINSON REGARDING, WITH NOT TOO GREAT ENTHUSIASM, THE PERFECT STATE OF THE FUTURE
A GUESS AT UNWRITTEN HISTORY

H. M. TOMLINSON
THAT
fairly violent scuffling
during the years
1914-1918, the opening skirmishes of the

fathers
war
be-
tween Organization and Liberty which our fore-
named
so strangely the
"War to End War,"
did not appear to conclude satisfactorily for the

victorious nations, especially England. Actually it was an excellent ground for the founding of that
Perfect State which, in the centuries that followed, arose on the lines laid largely by chance and the
exigencies of that early scramble. Yet it is possible the victorious statesmen may not have guessed that they had done really well. The name by which
the
war of those remote years was popularly known is enough to show that the difficulties faced by those men at the end of the war may have obscured the good they had done. That name is itself clear evidence of the not unpleasing credulity and ridiculous
but innocent desire of the people of that time. After all, those peoples were not so long out of
the Neolithic Age.
Their
memory was
still
strong
113
NONSENSEORSHIP
of the freedom of their earlier wanderings when they could go where they liked, work at what suited
them, eat and drink what pleased them, choose who should be their chief, and worship in any Temple
which promised most personal

then, natural for
benefits.
It was,
amusing a mistake in the naming of their "Great War." They not only certainly imagined they were ending War, but they imagined, too, they had a right to end it,
to
so
them
make
thinking that not only War, but every other act of the State, was for their decision. Their Governors,
therefore,
judged
it
wise to allow them this
illu-
sion to play with, so to distract their attention
from
This
the reality, which they would have resented.

illusion
Popular Government. We may laugh at it now, but in those days the directing minds of great nations found that common illusion no laughing matter. Some who
as
was known
laughed at it openly discovered they had laughed on the wrong side of the guillotine. It is usual in
this era of science,
by the Holy State of the national mass-power, both of body and mind, is complete, and when national emotion is raised by Press and Pulpit whenever it is required and
control
when
put wherever
the statesmen
it is
wanted, to ridicule the laxity of
war.
little
directed the nations in that early reflection, however, shows us that that
114
who
NONSENSEORSHIP
laxity is but apparent. Those statesmen went as far as they dared, and dared a little more with each success they won. They discovered that control
may
be gained by announcing control to be necessary for some quite innocent object, and then using and retaining the power thus acquired for a real but
undivulged purpose. Sheep, we are aware, never understand they are securely folded till the completing hurdle of the circuit is in its place, and then
they soon forget
want
is
grass,
and begin grazing; for all sheep and perhaps a turnip or two to give
it,
content in a limited pasture. It would be wrong for us, nevertheless, to blame those early folk for not understanding, as finely as
we
do, the true science of
government to be com-
and unquestioned mastery. We have learned much since then. Let us look back to those days
plete
to get the just perspective. One of the first significant things we notice is that those
for a
moment,
people were free to
criticize their politicians
baa-
it were. That was why had to have explained to them the "Objects they
ing across the hurdles, as

of the
True, it was easy going. enough to find a reason to satisfy them, but it is necessary for us to remember that they would not
115
They knew why they were
actually did not want to die. were reluctant to go to battle unless they
War."
They
NONSENSEORSHIP
submit to mutilation and death without some reason.
Much
as their governors
may
have desired
it,
those primitives would not agree willingly to the total surrender of conscience, individual liberty,
and of
the
life,
Holy
to "politicians," as the High Priests of State were then familiarly named. Indi-
vidual conscience, therefore, had to be cajoled, had to be bamboozled, had to be hypnotized; and a
man's liberty could not be taken from him unless he was helpless, or was looking, under clever political finger-pointing, the other
way.
It was this almost intractable matter of personal conscience and liberty which was the cause of the
angry disappointment following the Versailles Treaty which, illustrating still further the need for
subtle tact in dealing with our hairy forefathers, was called a Peace Treaty.
thrown upon those distant days and peoples when that ancient document, the fragmentary relic of which is now treasured in the museum at Tobolsk, is examined with even the little
a light
is
What
knowledge we possess of the events immediately following it! For a time, we must believe, humanity then was deliriously bereft. One could
almost believe the
years.
moon had
a greater pull in those
"No more
secret diplomacy!" historians tell us,

116
NONSENSEORSHIP
considerable ground, too, for accepting the amusing traditional tale that even at the end of the war the then President of the Ameris
was one of the battle. There
cries of the soldiers as
they went to
ican Republic (mainly confined at the time to the Western Continent), declared the first point for
the guidance of the Peace Conference must be an open discussion of the covenant. And the first
thing to happen when the war ended was the closing of the door of the council room by the peacemakers, who, naturally, were the very men with no
other interest
suit of
;
till
that
moment but
the full pur-
war yet nobody noticed the door was shut, though nobody could hear what was going on inside the
room.
The
faith in their politicians held
by the natives of the backyard communities which Europe was then divided on the very
into
eve,
we
see now, of the full continental control of in-
ternational
man-power by consolidated
their
finance
was the measure of
annoyance when, too late, naturally, the fact that the old shackles from which they had been promised freedom were noticed to be
riveted
upon them
it
is
several links tighter.

faith, so
happily youthful, which so reveals their ingenious minds as their resultant annoyance. That resentment illuminates
the essential fact for us in studying their mentality
117
But
not their
NONSENSEORSHIP
as social animals.
They
really did accept without
question, with
shut,
open and receptive mouths and eyes what was considered pleasing enough to
fortify
difficult
them
in the trials of warfare.

it is
They were,
it,
though
for us to understand
too
vacant and generous to realize that the "Objects of the War" were but figments nicely calculated to get
them busy.
the
leaders
The figments
of the
we must
time
give credit to were indeed not un-
Those inducing visions worked. They were accepted readily, and even with delight. It was sincerely believed that the pleasing dreams were substantial, that those chromatic vapours evoked by gifted statesmen were
imaginatively conjured up.
veritable promises of divine favor for meritorious
endurance.
From that we
can the more easily go with under-
standing to a study of the consequences of that attractive faith of undisciplined peoples so difficult
to grasp for modern students, the admirable submission of our
to the divine ordinances of the
who witness own uniform
daily
herds
Sacred Entity the State. the survivors of the not inconsiderable armies returned from the battlefields of 1918 with the innocent conviction that the gentlemen of England would keep a bond as faithfully as common sol118
High Priests of the Why, we even learn that
NONSENSEORSHIP
diers
!
The hardest
tasks of the statesmen of those
days arose out of such extraordinary expectations,

out of the ruinous supposition of the childishminded that the honoring of a bond, the fulfilment
of a promise in return for benefits received,
is
equally incumbent on everybody! With that knowledge we begin to realise the difficulties of their
statesmen.
A careful computation
shows us that in England, where indeed the lavish promises had been most picturesque, and where
the tough idea of personal liberty took longest to kill, it required just four years of severe discip-
and dry bread to reduce the masses generally to a pale, obedient, and constructive spirit. At first they would not work unless they wanted to, and then only at their own price.
linary measures
They
and
pointed, when answering their masters, to the fact that the best- fed people never worked at all,
lived in the best houses.
They refused
to can-
cel the official contracts
ordered to do so
made with them, even when by the police. They behaved in-
deed, those ex-soldiers, as though it had been their war. Such a state of mind we in these days really find impossible to elucidate. It is rather like trying
to read the spots on a giraffe. It is as inscrutable as the once general opinion that the community has
a right to decide upon
its
own
affairs.
119
NONSENSEORSHIP
Today we have reached that point in the evolution of society when uniformity is known to be more desirable, because more comfortable than liberty;
and uniformity
is
impossible without com-
pulsion.
is
A man with a free and contentious mind

its
a danger to the community, for he destroys
ease.
He
compels
his fellows to active thought, if
only to refute him. This is a dissipation of energy, and a local weakening of the structure of the State.
It
is
historically true that a
few men with ranging
and questioning minds have sometimes injected so strong an original virus of thought that the community has been changed in form and nature. It was the mistake of the earlier nations to give little attention to these troublesome and subversive fellows, who always thought more of the truth than
they did even of the inviolability of the High Priests of the State. They preferred to die rather than
surrender the out-dated rights of man. Therefore they had to die. The rights of man cannot be
allowed to stand in the
uniformity. It realized that the only freedom worth having is freedom from the necessity for individual thought. Per-
way of a nation's perfect was many centuries before man
unembarrassed freedom, freedom in which the mind may be empty and sunny, and assured
fectly
happily of not the slightest interruption from any

120
NONSENSEORSHIP
unsanctioned unofficial idea, became possible to a
community only
after the sanitary measures were
devised which sufficed against unexpected epidemics of speculative thinking.
are sadly aware, took time; for the brightly-colored hopes sent skyward so long ago as
This,
we
1914, and the vistas discovered as a consequence by
young men whose eyes

safely on the ground,
till
then had been resting
and the daring and lively questioning that was aroused by the incessant nudging of sleeping minds, coincided, as it unluckily happened, with the beginnings
when the
ended, of mass-production and international finance, so developing problems of govern-
"Great
War"
ment, the solving of which could not be reconciled with any admission of individual liberty and personal right. It was, therefore, the elimination of the notion of justice and liberty from common opinion which occupied statesmen from 1918 on-
wards.
evolved
Gradually the true social morality has been that one citizen should be so like all other
his
citizens that his only distinguishing characteristic
number; that the right ideal of citizenship, plain for all to follow, and ensuring the stability of society, is to be so loyal to the Holy State that an expression of a man's views in a gathering of his
is
121
NONSENSEORSHIP
fellows will rouse
water.
curiosity than a glass of Obviously so desirable a similarity of mind
no more
and
impossible, and preventing all dislike of the ordinances of the Sacred Entity, or Cabal of Inviolable Dispensers, a
character,
making disputation
uniformity in which war and peace become merely the national output of a vast machine controlled by
the Central Will, has been developed only through ages of Press Suggestion, popular education with
a bias that was designed but was scarcely noticeable,

the seizing and retaining of opportunities by legis-
whenever public opinion was sufficiently diverted, and a development of chemical science and aeronautics which has been encouraged by the enlators
lightened directors of the
major
in
industries.
The war which began

clearly, for
1914 showed quite
example, the value of the Censorship. The instituting of this office was never questioned,
it
impulse of obedience to superiors when faced by a sudden danger, caused by his fear of the unknown. More than that, the
for
first
was based on man's
English were in a lucky state of exaltation at the time, and were ready to sacrifice everything to save
from destruction what they were ancient, exquisite, and priceless

France.
told
was the
of
civilization
but in the prolonged and costly process they learned more than they had
They
did save
it;
122
NONSENSEORSHIP
known before of that own and so much of
;
civilization, as well as of their
their fear of losing either
was
evaporated. By that time, anyhow, criticism was useless, because the Censorship then was empow-
ered to deal even with a derisive cough
thority was solemnly giving orders. office of the Censor was set in its place unnoticed in a time of public nervousness and excitement, the
when AuOnce the
became possible to bring all elastic enough to be extended even to those figments which merely worked on the timidity of unbalanced minds.
rest
was
easy, for
it
criticism within a
law which was
became unpatriotic to express a dislike for margarine, when butter was prohibited. It was unpatriotic for a blind hunchback with heart disease to protest that he was no soldier, if he were ordered
It
to the Front.
For though
the Censor, in the early
period of that war, dealt merely with news and opinions which might aid the enemy, yet, as the
value of adding to a nation's enemies became apparent to Authority, it became necessary to turn into enemies of the State those who denounced profiteers
for turning blood into money, those who denounced generals for wasting the lives of boys in purposeless actions, those
against the spending of the nation's resources to succor needy con-
who spoke
tractors,
and those who asked whether the war was

123
NONSENSEORSHIP
to
go on
till all
were dead, or whether
it
might be
little
Stopped profitably at any time by using a
common
munity,
at
sense.
this
Luckily for the welfare of the comneed for recognizing as enemies all,
from the decision of the Central Will, a need which was the natural
abroad,
differed
home and
who
flower of that confidence which Authority acquired through discovering the ease of control, put within
the power of the Censor by the time of the Peace Conference every possible form of protest, every call for light, every cry of pain, every demand that
such a 'horrible nonsense" as war should cease from
human
erosity.
affairs,
every plea for compassion and gen-
Thus the problem of perfect government was engendered and simplified. It was at last possible
to ensure, at least outwardly, a semblance of uni-
formity.
The
rest
was a matter of
evolution,
till
today only a particular enquiry will determine a man from a woman, though it may fail to determine
a fool from a man.
what is officially and the nation is

tented,
agree with announced by the Sacred Entity,

alike, all
All are
as loyal
as
stable
actinozoal plasm. built like a rock.

arisen;
and homogeneous, as conand industrious, as a reef of Thus the Perfect State has been
The City
124
of
God
has at last
its
and
in each of the
uniform homes of
NONSENSEORSHIP
neuters, or workers, there
otic
is
to be
found the Patri-
Symbol law to hang
a portrait of a Sheep, enjoined by in a principal place, and bearing the
Bless this Loyal Face." Here, however, we see at once that such a right condition of the public mind could never have been
legend
"God
acquired by a Censorship, by a mere prohibition,

that of individual thinking and acting. That ensures merely a simulacrum of homogeneity. The
is,
appearance of general acquiescence may exist, though not the real thing. It is easy to compel men to do what they would not do freely if allowed an
opportunity for their reason to work. The problem
we know, an
was to prevent the working of reason. Today, as order is issued by The Chosen, and is followed by a campaign in the Press, and by revivals exhorted from the Pulpit. There is no chance for
the intrusion of reason.
for reason to
No
facts are ever issued
work upon, no questioning is ever suggestions of the Press and Pulpit prompt loyalty and obedience, and what might, in
allowed.
The
early times, have been resented as ridiculous, becomes the mode; and thus, if any rebels exist, it is
but
briefly, for
they are denounced as solitary and
repugnant independents.
suggestion becomes because the majority of people acpublic opinion cept it without knowing there is reason to question
125
NONSENSEORSHIP
the suggestion; and the minority also accept it in the end through weariness of an unpleasant and
even dangerous distinction.
Yet
not, observe, all the minority.
It
was the
experience of our forefathers that unsuspected centres of infection always remained, and were not
discovered
country. withstood
they had poisoned large areas of the Some bold fellow, here and there, had
till
all efforts
at intimidation,
and
in time
made
others as courageous as himself. means had to be found to eliminate the possibility of infection
by
original minds, or clearly the

itself safe.
Holy
State
could not consider
Here, indeed, we
see the hardest of the problems statesmen of the past had to solve. From the mere negation of the
Censorship, a positive advance had to be made to the obliteration of original thought. This at first,
necessarily,
was but
tentative,
and only the con-
fidence gained through successful experiment enabled governments at last to find where the real
trouble lay. It was supposed, at

radical views
first,
that the destruction of
subversive political tracts would be enough.
and the persecution of

Yet, of course,
it
was learned that

growth
elsewhere
as fast as these
were cropped,
had
is
become vigorous.
natively
126
The
look
human
intelligence
prone
to
NONSENSEORSHIP
towards new things.
Then
it
was
that, after
a long
suspicion of the origin of ideals, great statesmen were led to an examination of classic literature
and a study of the arts. Then they saw, what they might have known sooner, that in the very institutions supported by the State, the Public Libraries and Art Galleries, were actually preserved the potent ideals which demeaned that general opinion which the State was laboring to establish. The famous Day of Release was ordered. This was ordained to free mankind from its heritage of the spirit. test was made, and by that test any book or picture or poem which could not be approved or understood by native deacons of Solomon Island missions (who were imported for the purpose) was at once extirpated. This checked a great
deal of the troublesome growth of the mind. Music,
strangely forgotton; and it was proved that the great revolution which burst out in Europe 120 years after the "Great War" began
however, was
emotion occasioned by the continued playing of the compositions of one Beethoven, whose work is now fortunately lost, and other music which rein the
mained in favor in spite of the official insistence on the use of the steam saxophone for public concerts. Men, wherever they dared, insisted on havAnd though the records were at ing the best.
127
NONSENSEORSHIP
length destroyed, the tenacious memories of a few fanatics and cranks preserved much of the old music, and that usually of the worst and most
disloyal.
had to be taken by men in control of the State. The memory of what was classical was kept though in an ever-fading
see another step
Here we
condition,
and now and again some point of memory

beauty abnormal brain of a genius, and work of hygiene had to be done over
fructified to almost its original suggestive
in the fortuitously
thus the state
again; for curiously enough people everywhere rose like a tide, and moved spontaneously towards
these manifestations of liberty and beauty, away from their loyalty to the God- State.
and
A
for
method, therefore, had to be discovered, obliterating what remained in the public
first
memory
of what was magical and rebellious, and then for the elimination of any possibility of original genius
arising;
and genius was,

all
it
was
seen, first
and
last,
the cause of
the trouble.
all
great works of art was followed, fifty years later, by the Period of Purgdestruction of
ing.
The
All who were denounced for having quoted forbidden poetry, or for humming forbidden music,
were executed.
Such malefactors, who refused to

128
forget, obviously could not be allowed to live. This
NONSENSEORSHIP
gave a long period of peace, in which the Sacred
Entity, the Unassailable Authority, took concrete form. Even so, the destruction of the treasures
of the past, and of all memory of them, did not prevent the spontaneous appearance, now and then, of extraordinary men who, by divination it would
seem, perceived a flatness and monotony in society,
a sameness of common thought, and who laughed at the estimable uniform flocks; often, indeed,
more than a century since the works of Darwin and other philosophers had been burned. Young students who showed an aptitude for science, and so were
its
stampeding them. Now science had
turn.
It was
potentially dangerous, were taken early within the Sacred Precincts, initiated into the mysteries of the Priests, and were given work and safety
under the shadow of the Entity. They rarely went wrong; and when they did they went further or
were heard of no more.

of science were set the problem of finding a method of sterilizing the unfit, that is, people who showed any decadent tendency to
These
men
All the increase of population by that time was occasioned under the direction of the High
originality.
State had not only the power of dealing death, but of bringing new life.
Priests, so that the
Holy
129
NONSENSEORSHIP
The new
life, it is
evident,
had to be determined,
as far as possible,
perfect citizen; two, through the destruction of intelligence whereever it inadvertently appeared, through the selection of parents
sufficiently
by a scientific specification of a and in the course of a century or
loyal
and
docile
to
of-
accept marriage immediately

ficials,
when ordered by
and by certain
signs, such as lustiness,
by
which, at a birth, the skilled Public Watchers
who
accompanied midwives were made suspicious of the new-born as possible enemies of the State, at
last
mankind arrived at its present perfection, content, and happiness, with hardly an intellectual
doubt or a sign of suspicious joy to mar the whole
serene horizon of the
Holy
it
State's exactitude.
Yet,
we
to
dare ask, had
not been for that
little
"War
End War"
named by to know what they were

arisen?
It
is
of 1914-1918, so innocently our forefathers who had too much liberty
talking about, would the
possibility of our present social tranquility
have
hardly
likely.
from all criticism, from all and spirit, an internal peace which
The freedom we enjoy interruptions of mind

is
indeed never
broken except by the lethal germs of our modern wars that, in the due course of nature, obliterate every week or so a few of our cities, was a lucky
chance that was seized upon by public-spirited
legislators
who had the
prescience to
130
know
its
value.
CHARLES HANSON TOWNE AND THE LAW
IN VINO DEMI-TASSE
CHARLES HANSON TOWNE
Philosopher and I were sitting in one of the innumerable restaurants in New York
THE Young-Old
where the sanctity of the law is about as much considered as a bicycle ride up Mt. Etna. At the next
table
indeed, all around us

little
rich red
wine was
being poured into

demi-tasse/
cups.
"The new motto of America should be fln vino "
my friend
said, smiling.
And
I quite agreed with him.
For
it is
being
done everywhere; in the most exalted

in the lowest.
and Poor old human nature, which an

circles,
organized minority are so bent upon changing overnight, cannot be altered and, all the emphasis in a
;
supposedly free country having been placed
upon
not drinking, the prohibitionists are wondering so many of us care for liquid refreshment.
why
There is too much verboten in America today. I can remember the time, not so long ago, when no dinner-party was counted a success unless four or
131
NONSENSEORSHIP
five cocktails
were served before we
sat
down
at the
that era passed. It was soon evident that such foolishness would lead to grave disaster
table.
But
not to the grave and the young business man who was seen to consume even one glass of beer at luncheon was frowned upon, catalogued as unif
;
steady, even in the face of the fact that perhaps the most efficient people in the world were automatic
beer-drinkers.
America we had other ideas. Big Business, which has become such a potent factor among us, and more a part of our national consciousness than Art and Letters ever will be, of its own volition placed a ban upon immoderate drinkof whom there were ing; and the sane among us still many gladly fell in line, and either went
to drinking, in
As
upon the water-wagon or took a nip only occasionally when the cares of life weighed too heavily and insistently upon us.
periodically
Why,
then, the
Reformers?
Why
Workers? Why the Extremists? Not a great and wise people working out their own salvation from within, they must step forth in solemn from battalions, and make us pure and holy
without.
the Uplift content with
We
entire
no reason why an nation should be indicted for the sins and

resent them.
There
132
is
NONSENSEORSHIP
It would be quite as sensible to forbid connubial bliss because there are a handful
failings of a few.
of libertines in the world.
cry goes up, however, that the next generation will be so much better because of our enforced
The
good behavior now. I am afraid that I am not enough of an altruist to care so definitely about the
morals of a race unborn. I feel that
looking over the
files
my
children,
of our newspapers, as they sip their light wine and beer, may smile and say, "Poor grandpa! He had so little self-control that
the
his
put the screws on him and friends. Too bad! They must have been a fast
to
Government had
set in his day.
And
yet
he
left
heritage of health and strength. was such an awful devil as history
We
us a pretty good wonder if he
makes
out."
that nothing, in moderation, ever hurt anybody. That is why the wise among us are against Prohibition and strongly for Temperance.
is
The
truth
Normal men do not

is
like to
be coddled. If coddling
done, however, they like to pick their coddlers.

fuss over us, feeling our pulse, taking our
We don't like a lean and sour-visaged Prohibitionist

making a
temperature, smoothing our brow. The whole trouble with the world today, as a sane man views
that there has been altogether too much coddling of the physically and mentally unfit.
it,
is
133
NONSENSEORSHIP
have become, through drifting, a nation of make laws so fast that the behypocrites.
We
We
wildered citizen cannot follow them.
We
add
amendment
after
at
and then laugh

secretly rebel.
amendment to our Constitution, what we have done, the while we

have few convictions, and we
We
refuse to face issues squarely and honestly. pretend to be virtuous before the rest of the world ;
We
but
we
are like the ostrich which hides
its
head in
the sands.
We pretend
that, just as the eugenists
think of the physical attributes of the coming genand we eration, we consider the mental attributes
turn around and raise a race of bootleggers. permit our enormous foreign population to see us
at our legislative
We
work and then we go proudly and sanctimoniously to restaurants and allow Italian, German and French waiters to pour red wine into
;
our demi-tasses.
Oh, we are not in our cups only in our halfcups. It would all be very amusing were it not so
terribly serious.
For we are
rapidly floating toward
trouble; and, hypocritically enough, we will not admit it. When it is said, since the tragedy of Prohibition, that the
reformers will next snatch our
cigars
and cigarettes out of our mouths, we shrug our shoulders, smile and pass on, saying, "Oh, no! that would be going too far!" in the face of what
134
NONSENSEORSHIP
already has been accomplished in this land of the spree and the home of the grave.
Yes, we have become grave indeed. For there can be no doubt that there is a feeling of great unhappiness and unrest in America now. One hears
do not try to save I merely live from day to day, hoping any more; against hope that things will right themselves, and
the
most
solid citizens saying, "I
that the old order will
somehow
return."
?
Who gets a long-term lease nowadays
Those of
us who are old enough to remember the simplicity and peace of the golden 'Eighties and 'Nineties are appalled at the nervous tension and complexities of this hour. We are all catalogued and tagged, just as they are in that Prussia we so recently and fervently despised and we are hounded by income;
tax investigators, surrounded by a horde of spies who search our luggage, pry into our kitchens to
see if
we
ants
making home brew, raided in restaurand laughed at by king-ridden and shackled

are
Europeans.
It isn't pleasant to realize that you are burdened with taxes partly to cover the salaries of Federal
whose delicate duty it is to spy upon you. And then when you walk out and talk to the policeman on your street, he will whisper in your ear that he knows where he can get you some delicious ale,
Officers
135
NONSENSEORSHIP
and
see to
is
it
that
it is
safely delivered at your door.
the America, deny it as we will, that we are living in today. I confess that I hang my head a bit, and am ashamed to look a Frenchman in the
This
face.
Not long
tician
ago, at a dinner, I asked a certain poliI refuse to grace him with the name of
statesman, though he has ambitions to be known as such why, if he believed in the Volstead Act, he
still
to be amusing; to "I am drinking as
consumed whiskey. His answer was intended me it was disgraceful. Said he:
much
as I can in order to lessen
the supply for the other fellow." And just a while back I went to a banquet at a country club near New York. Two policemen in
uniform were sent by the local authorities to "guard the place" while much liquor was poured. These
minions of the sacred law were openly served with
and laughed at the Constitution of the United States, the while they drank. Everyone at that party was loud in denunciation of Prohibition
highballs,
and what has come in its wake, yet went on dancing with the casual remark that it was of no consequence that they broke the law, since everyone was doing it
and everyone always would. Uphold the law, no matter what
it,
is
I have heard people cry. That,

136
it
injected into seems to me,
NONSENSEORSHIP
and has no part in the attitude of thinking men and women in a land like America. I suppose, arguing thus, that if a law
is
mere Teutonic
stupidity,
were passed tomorrow prohibiting the carrying of, say, hand-bags or canes, they would feel it incumbent upon themselves, as good Americans, to
into line,
right,
fall
the knee and whisper meekly, "All most beloved country! I obey!"
it, is
bow
A good American, as I understand

who
not one
ignorantly stands for the letter of the law, no matter what that law may be. good American is
one who
tries to set his
country right one who looks

;
beyond the present ungenerous attitude of the fanatics; one who visualizes the future and prays that
our liberty
not be further jeopardized, for the good of the generations that are to follow us. fought to rid the world of autocracy, yet we
may
We
have suddenly become the most autocratic nation on earth. Prohibition is a symbol of the death of freedom. The issue at stake is as clear-cut as taxation without representation; and our legislators should remember a certain well-known Boston tea-
party. There would have been no United States of America unless a few honest men with sound convictions had rebelled and protested against tyranny. The right kind of rebel makes the right kind of
citizen.
137
NONSENSEORSHIP
I have heard a few people liken one's duty in the matter of the draft to the Prohibition law. If we
obeyed a summons to
ing or not,
fight,
whether
we
liked fight-
should likewise obey the law regarding drinking, they contend. The two things are as separated as the Poles. In 1914, and thereafter,
civilization itself
we
was
at stake
and that man would
have been blind indeed who did not see the stern
and clear-cut issues before us all. We leaped to arms because we wanted to protect humanity, because the death-knell of democracy was sounding. Prohibition, these same people would tell us, should be enforced to save poor, weak humanity and civilization again, and we should fight to that end. Yet
as long as the world has been moving, civilized man has been consuming a certain amount of alcohol,
and has been

disaster.
in
We
no serious danger of going down to have progressed through the ages,
despite our cheerful cups of wine; and though of course a few imbeciles have dropped from the line,
the rest of us have been none the worse
in fact,
sometimes a
tions.
little
better
for our occasional liba-
Let anyone deny this who has ever, for a moment even, been in Arcady! And the dreadful and incontrovertible fact remains that the sober
nations have not proved themselves superior to those who drink in moderation.
138
NONSENSEORSHIP
Who are happy over Prohibition?
gers.
First, the
Pro-
hibitionists themselves, and, secondly, the bootleg-
clamped on in our great cities, the more rejoicing goes on in that mysterious inner and under circle which dispenses liquor, and will continue to dispense it, I fear, until the end of
the lid
is
The more
time.
Whenever there
is
a "drive" on in
New York
to
"mop up
illicit
the
the place," prices soar to the skies, and trade waxes brisker than ever. No wonder
the bootleggers grow happy and rich; and evade the income tax which the rest of us must pay.
sympathetic toward those who say that they have been driven to excessive drinking because a certain obnoxious law has been passed. The only
am not
way
soberly; it is the jingled and jangled arguments of bar-room bores that hurt the cause of the men and women
is
it
to fight Prohibition
to fight
who
are moderate drinkers, and
their hearts to see
a return to
who wish with all common sense in our
country.
Americans never do anything piecemeal. Probably at the root of all our strange fanaticism about drink was the thought that the saloon had better go; that it was time for such foul places to disappear. The pendulum had to swing all the way. If it would swing back a little; if the Government would step in and control the liquor traffic, do away
139
We
NONSENSEORSHIP
with
except for medicinal purposes, and give the people light wine and beer, a truce could be declared over night. Drunkenness should be made
spirits,
a prison offence.
No
matter who the offender
against public decency is he should be lodged in jail. Whether one is a so-called gentleman coming
out of his club, or the meanest tramp in the streets, he should be punished. There would be no visible
a law like this were passed and rigorously enforced. I am afraid that so long as grapes grow on vines
drunkenness
if
and apples on
trees ; so long as fermentation
is
one
of Nature's processes, there can be no such thing as Prohibition. And the Biblical justification for
drinking
pleasant reading for those who like, a little wine at their dinner tables. and then,
is
now Yet
there are fanatics
who
rise
up and shout
that the
wine Christ caused to appear at the marriage feast
Cana was not intoxicating. What divination If water is theirs which makes them so positive? was just as good, why did not water remain in the
of
casks?
If
we would spend more time making laws
that
worked for good, rather than for evil and Graft is a great evil; if we would realize that it is not so
much our concern to make the other fellow good as to make him happy, as Stevenson so beautifully
140
NONSENSEORSHIP
puts than
acts,
it
we
then, I say, we would be better employed are today with our foolish, fussy bills and
mandates, precepts and restrictions.

;
I believe firmly in local option in all things but there is no reason why New York, or any other
great city, should live as Kansas and Idaho live. I prefer New York because a big city gives me a spiritual uplift that a prairie town does not. It is
my
go
privilege to live
where I
desire.
I like to hear
;
fine music, to
come
in contact with intellectuals

;
to
to plays that are
satisfy
my
and
soul.
worth while to read books that I find such a life in New York.
I have no quarrel with the

silence
man who
and
prefers the
plains.
loneliness of forests
He
may
I
let
him
be far happier than I. But I do insist that if alone, he also should let me alone. Throbcities thrill
bing
me
cities
with their glamour, their
wonder, their enchantment, their dreams of agate and stone, their lofty towers that plunge to the very
skies
and
kiss the clouds.
I happen to like the inno-
cent laughter in a glass of champagne. You may call it wicked hilarity. But the Continental manner
of living appeals to me. warmth and fervor of life;
I like the color and
and people who drink red wine with their meals seem to me to be more
cosmopolitan than those
part of the pageant of
who do not. All this seems

life to
me.
am
not pro-
141
NONSENSEORSHIP
and I do not care to be made provincial by unintelligent and unimaginative law-makers. It may be that I am entirely wrong. I do not
vincial,
know.
But I do know
sonable to force
it,
me
seems utterly unreato abstain from wine if I wish

that
it
just because there are a few heavy imbibers of whiskey in the world. I think it is a far more seri-
ous matter to have practically all of us law-breakers than to have one-half of one per cent of us
drunkards.
Let us have done with insincere, inelastic laws, and get back to wisdom and truth and sanity.
142
JOHN
V. A.
WEAVER NOTICING THE BARTENDER WHO HAS BEEN THROWN OUT OF WORK BY PROHIBITION
BOOTLEG
JOHN V. A. WEAVER
(With a graceful bow to Don Marquis)
How many times I got to tell you ? words you leave that girl alone. Leave her alone! Leave her alone, you hear? You think I'll have my son foolin' around
You heard me
is
!
Them
my
little
And
thinks
snippy rat that's all stuck-up, my son's not good enough for her?
"Yeh," that's what Bill says, "Yeh, it's like I say; Ellen is got swell friends up on the Drive; I'm sorry she had to break a date with Fred.
But
still,
you know, the world
is
changed a
lot,
And we changed with it. You're about the same, But me well, I been gettin' right along, And honest, Jack, you see the sense yourself-
Why
should I let
my
daughter marry a clerk?"
Can you Of Of
believe
it ?
Why,
damn near
fainted.
His daughter too good
for the likes of us!
course I got so mad I couldn't see! course I pasted him square in the eye! And if I catch him sayin* things about me
And I tell you, knock his stuck-up head off If you go near the dirty oilcan's place, And crawl around that snippy brat of his,
I'll
!
I'll
kick you out into the street to stay.
143
NONSENSEORSHIP
You The
hear that?
nerve!
Right out in the street you go!

dirty, lousy,
The
low-down crook!
it!
Bootleg gettin' stuck-up over money! The world is crazy, that's all there is to
tell
Crazy, I
Listen.
you!
All turned upside-down!
It's fifteen
years I
know
this Bill.
Them good old days, most every afternoon On the way home from the lumber yards I'd drop And get a beer, and gas around a while. That was my second home, I useta say, And Bill's Place was a home you could be proud Say. The old woman never kep' a floor As clean as Bill's was. And the brass spittoons And rail you could of shaved lookin' in one. And all the glasses polished And the tables And over at the free-lunch counter, So neat
!
in
of.
Charlie the coon with a apron white like chalk, Dishin' out hot-dogs, and them Boston Beans,
nights a great big hot roast ham, roast beef simply yellin' to be et, And washed down with a seidel of old Schlitz!
And Sad'dy
Or
Oh, say, that sure was fun, and don't forget it. Old Ed, and Tom, and Baldy Frank McGee, And the two Bentleys, we was all the reg'lars.
was our meetin'-place. And there we stood, And Lord! The rows about the government, And arguin! and all about the country, How it was goin' to the dogs. And maybe
It
Somebody 'd Would have
start a song,
and old Pop Dikes

playin',
to quit the checker-game in the corner

I never seen
That him and Fat Connell was always
And
never gettin' through.
144
NONSENSEORSHIP
No bums come
in Bill didn't like to have
He made
Of
'em hit
and stay for more'n a minute; no drunks around j the air. Well, some of us,
course, might get just a wee mite too much Under the belt, but who did that ever hurt? At least we knowed the licker wasn't poison. And when somebody would get very lit Bill was right there to try and make him stop I can't see how it ever hurt us any.
;
And
A
I
Bill! He was some barkeep! One swell guy! pleasant word for everybody, always, Straight as a string, and just the whole world's friend.
He
never saw a guy was liked so much. hardly took a drink, just a cigar,
And oncet a while a pony, say, of lager. And my, the way that bird could tell a story Why, many a time I laughed until I cried. And if it happened I was out of dough,
Bill
was right there
to
make
a little loan.
Generous, that was Bill, and one good pal.
Them was
I
great old place it was, that place of Bill's. the happy days them was the days.
1
never will forget that good-bye party

us.
The night that Prohibition was wished on You bet it wasn't any rough-house then.
We
And
Bill
all
stood 'round the bar, solemn and quiet,
what to say. was funny what had happened to him. He didn't crack a smile the whole blame night. He just would shake his head, and bite his lips, And gosh, the way his eyes was shootin' fire.
couldn't hardly think of
it
1
The
last thing that
he said before 145
I left,
NONSENSEORSHIP
"By God,
The
I
I'll
I'm closing here.
get back at 'em, you just wait! But don't you fret I'll get 'em
dirty, pussy-footin' lousy to
skunks
!"
had
go home early.
And
the next day
I seen the
And
all
wagons comin' to take the bar the furniture. I felt like cryin'.
Well, you
Bill goes
know what
this prohibition
is.
away, and stays about three months. then one day I meets' him on the street. "Well, Jack," he says, "You want some real good gin?' "Just what I need," I says. "All right," he says, "You come down to the house at nine o'clock.
And
I'll fix you up. I'll give you half a case Four Bucks a bottle." "Four a bottle !" Thinkin* he must be kiddin'. "Sure," he says,
.
I says,
"I got to make my profit. There's the risk. This is good stuff. I made it by myself. I guarantee that it won't make you sick."
"I'm sick already, just from hearin' the price. No thanks. Not now," I says. He says all right, But when I want some, just remember him.
And so, of course, later I did want some, And had to pay that much, and even more;
But
hell,
The You
That
stuff ain't goin' to
what can you do ? So long's you're sure burn your insides out,
got to
Bill
pay the price. And all the friends had useta have is customers,
And all get stung the same. And dozens more. Them old days Bill was one fine friend for sure, Happy and nice and straight and generous. And now to think he high-brows you and me!
146
NONSENSEORSHIP
A
And
great big house he's got, and a new Packard, di'monds for his wife, that scrubbed the floors
in the days when he was only barkeep. That's what this Prohibition done for him, And what's it do for me, I'd like to know?
Back
makes a crook of me, the same as him, Only I'm losin' money, and he gets it.
It
Why,
say, I catch myself all of the time

this Prohibition law,
it.
Laughin' about
And And
figgerin' new ways how I could break that's the way it is with everybody.
We
And And And
get to see that one law is a joke, think it's smart to bust it all to pieces.
pretty soon there's all the other laws,
how're you goin' to keep from think' likewise About a thing like stealin', and all that? No wonder that we got these here now crime waves! No wonder everybody is a crook!
But that
ain't
what I'm
sayin' to
you now
!
You
leave that stuck-up little Jane alone They's plenty of girls that's pretty in the
world-
You Ten And
leave that dirty oilcan's daughter be. years ago she used to run around
rush the can for
me and
other folks.
Now
And
she's a real swell lady!
Damn
her eyes,
!
Bill's, and them there pussy- footin' fish The world is crazy And I'm goin' nuts High-tonin' me! You hear me? If I catch you Foolin' around that girl, I kick you out, So fast you won't know what has ever hit you!
!
bootleg's daughter!
Hell!
147
AND THE PLAYWRIGHT

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
Every American playwright goes about these days oppressed by a foreboding.
his
work
sus-
He
pects that before long a censor is going to materialize out of thin air to take stern and morose charge
of the
American
theatre.
It
is
true that no statu-
tory precipitation of such an agent has been definitely proposed. It is true that the policeman from
the nearest corner has not gone so far as to drop around and warn him that he'd better be careful.
Nevertheless, he has the foreboding. He perceives dimly that a desire to chasten the stage is in the air.
And
war.
he
is
right.
It
is.
It has been ever since the
course an itch to lay hands on the theatre was begetting restlessness in the American bosom considerably prior to April 6, 1917. It is part of this country's Puritan inheritance to believe that
Of
play going
is
somehow bad,
that an
enjoyment and
patronage of the theatre is sinful. This belief flows as an unconscious undercurrent in the thought even
148
ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT RESCUING THE PLAYWRIGHT FROM THE AWFUL SHEARS OF THE CENSOR
NONSENSEORSHIP
try pathetically hard to seem and be liberal and unpharisaical, the kind who
of those clergymen
who
always begin their lectures on Avery Hopwood by saying that they yield to no one in their admiration
and respect for the many splendid
ladies
and
gentlemen of the stage
whom
they are proud to
number among
Shaw, in
his
their acquaintances.
comparatively mild-mannered pre"The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet," recognizes the Puritan hostility to the theatre, but,
face to
somewhat perversely,
ascribes
it
to the fact that the
promenoirs have always been used as show-windows by the courtesans of each generation. I suspect,
however, that that hostility was more deeply rooted. The Puritans disliked the theatre because it was
was a place where people went in deAnd you weren't liberate quest of enjoyment. supposed to do that on earth. Plenty of time for
jolly.
It
that later on.
I was a knee-breeched schoolboy in Philadelphia, some of the more dissipated of us used to organize Saturday excursions to Keith's old Eighth
Street Theatre, a vaudeville temple known to the natives as the Buy-Joe. Fortified with a quarter
When
and some sandwiches, one went at eleven in the morning and hung on till the edge of midnight. To my genuine surprise and confusion, I gathered that
149
NONSENSEORSHIP
some of our classmates not only avoided these
orgies, but sincerely believed that we,
who indulged in them were simply courting Hell's fire. They stayed at home and, I suppose, read "Elsie DinsIt so happens that I never encountered that book
more."
formative years, but was in my hopelessly corrupted thirties before ever I saw a copy. Even then, it did not lack interest. And one passage,
during
my
rewarded a glance through its pages. It seems that Elsie, arriving from somewhere, reached some city in the late evening. Her father
at least, richly
(a rakish, devil-may-care'fellow
all right for
who thought
it
was
met
Elsie to play the piano on Sunday) her at the station and engaged a cabriolet to
take her across town to whatever shelter had been
they were bowling along one of the principal streets, Elsie noticed a building which the author described in shuddering accents as having, if I remember correctly, "a lighted
selected for the night.
As
fa9ade."
The
hell
tone,
if
description,
rather
not the precise words of the suggested that here was a

circles
gambling
whose lower
were dedicated
"Oh, father,"
to rites of nameless infamy.
Elsie shrank back into
the cloistered shadows of the cab.
she cried in hurt bewilderment, "what kind of place was that?" Smitten, apparently, with a certain
150
NONSENSEORSHIP
remorse that he had suffered her virginal eyes to reflect so scabrous a spot, he put a sheltering arm
around her and
said, sadly:
"That,
little
daughter,
was a
THEATRE."
climax, perhaps, you smile a little. well to remember that the children who
At which limp
But
it is
were molded by "Elsie Dinsmore" are now grown up and can be detected voting warmly at every election.
Many
of
them kicked over the
traces long
ago, but there are also many who are reading Harold Bell Wright today. They admire Henry
Ford.
They
sit
enthralled at the feet of Dr.
John
And, not wryly but with undiscouraged faith, they vote away for the Hylans and the Hardings of each recurrent crisis. They brought the bootlegger into existence and, at a
Straton.
Roach
by anyone against the theatre, come scurrying intently from a thousand unsuspected flats and two-story houses. They are the more responsive to such cries since the war. That might have been foreseen by any
rallying cry lifted
they will
one at
form.
all
familiar with the psychopathology of recigarette addict who, in a spartan mois
ment, swears off smoking,

the inner
familiar
him of his his dinner for days and days. His body, long to the tobacco, had dutifully taken on habituated
gnaw
that robs
enough with sleep and roils
151
NONSENSEORSHIP
the business of manufacturing
its
antidote.
When
and
the tobacco
is
abruptly removed, the body continues
for a while to turn out the antidote as usual
during that while, that antidote goes roaming

angrily through the system, seeking something to
oppose and destroy.
A somewhat analogous condition has agitated the

body
politic ever since the late
Fall of 1918.
The
passage of the Eighteenth
Amendment had robbed
the prohibitionists of their chief excitement; then the signing of the Armistice took away the glamor
of public-spiritedness
from
all
those good people
who had had such a

hold, then, the
splendid time keeping an eye on their presumably treasonable neighbors. Be-
Busy Body (which is in every one of us) all dressed up and nowhere to go. The itch became tremendous. The moving pictures caught
it first.
ought to be. uneasy. He dreads a censorship of the theatre because he suspects (not without reason) that it will be corrupt, that
it
No He
wonder the American playwright
is
will
work
foolishly,
it
and
that,
having
taken and relished an inch,
will take
an
ell.
the more uneasy because he realizes that the theatre presents a special incitement and a speis
He
cial
problem
that presented
a problem altogether different from by the bookstall, for instance. The

152
NONSENSEORSHIP
play, once produced,
is
open to
all
the world.
It
have been written with the thought that it would amuse Franklin P. Adams, but it is attended
may
(in a body) by the Unintelligentsia. It may have been heavily seasoned in the hope that it would jounce the rough boy of Baltimore, H. L. Mencken
and
lo,
there in the third
row on the
visibly
ill
aisle, is
it.
Dr.
Frank Crane, being made

playwright
by
Your
and
may write a piece to touch the memories the hearts of elderly sinners, but he has to face the fact that the girls from Miss Spence's
stir
school
may come
fluttering to
it,
row on row.
On his desk is a seductive two-volume assemblage

of "Poetica Erotica," edited
It
is
a book which, antiquarian. agitate the Postmaster General,
by T. R. Smith, the if flaunted, would

stir
up
the
Grand
Jury, and make the Society for the Suppression of Vice call a special mass-meeting. It is managed as
a commercial article by a system of furtive, semiprivate sales which probably enhance its value as a source of revenue and yet shut the mouth of the
heirs of
Anthony Comstock.
folder announces
that the juicy Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter will shortly issue from the same presses. And so on,
a neat arrangement but one which cannot be imitated by the playwright. When he
endlessly.
It
is
wants to be naughty, he must make up

153
his
mind
to
NONSENSEORSHIP
being naughty right out on the street-corner where every one can see him.
in the moments when he is disposed he sometimes thinks that suspect plays to temporize, might, like saucy novels, be first inspected in
And though,
manuscript, he knows full well that no such tactics

are really feasible in the theatre. inwardly hot with resentment,
Your
may
publisher, nevertheless
take the occasional precaution of showing the even to script of a thin-ice book to the authorities
the
self-constituted
ones
thereby
forestalling
prosecution by agreeing to delete in advance such phrases and incidents as seem likely to agitate
the flavor and significance of a play depends too much on the manner of its performance and cannot be clearly forecast
those authorities unduly.
But
prior to that performance any more than the hue of a goblet can be guessed before the wine is poured.
I can testify to that
I,
who
in
my
time, have seen
make a minx out of Ophelia, a mild-mannered mouse out of Katherine, an honest woman
players
out of
Lady Macbeth and a
man
cast as
out of Shylock. the servants of Petruchio invade
benevolent old gentleI have seen French players
"The
of the Shrew" with a comic pantomime in which they fought for their turns at the keyhole
Taming
of Petruchio's
bedroom wherein Kate was being

154
NONSENSEORSHIP
subjected to a
little
off-stage taming.
It
would
have amused Shakespeare immoderately, I imagine, and certainly it would have surprised him. Until
his piece is
spoken, even the author cannot tell and thereafter, from night to night, he cannot be
sure.
the quality of an eternal fable in the pathetic old tale of the stagehand who had always felt that, if chance would ever give him
That
is
why
there
is
even the smallest of

actors
roles,
he would show these
where their shortcomings were. He would not drone out even the least important and most perfunctory of speeches. Not he. Into every syl-
would pour real meaning, real conviction. At last, after twenty years of yearning from the wings, chance did rush him on as an understudy. Unfortunately, he was assigned to the role of the page in "King John," who must march into the throne-room and announce the approach of Philip
lable he
the Bastard.
So,
it
of the theatre
seems apparent that any real supervision must function with relation to pro-
duced plays and cannot deal with mere unembodied and undetermined manuscripts.
Our playwright's
if
suspicion that such supervision,
managed by a politically appointed censor, would work foolishly, are justified by all he has heard of
155
NONSENSEORSHIP
fields
such functionaries as they have worked in other and in other lands. This was true of the gag
finally pried off the
which the doughty Brieux
mouth of the French playwright. It has certainly been true of the mild and intermittent discipline to which the remote and slightly puzzled Lord
Chamberlain has subjected the English dramatists. Indeed, when their mutinous mutterings finally jogged Parliament into inspecting his activities,
the
Lord Chamberlain was somewhat taken aback
by the tactics of Shaw, who, instead of hissing him for forbidding public performances of certain Shaw
plays, derided and denounced him instead for the plays he had not suppressed. And
and Ibsen
indeed, for every play which the Lord Chamberlain has suppressed, the old playgoer of London could
point to five which, had he been more intelligent, he
might more reasonably have suppressed in its place. But after all those scuffles on the Strand do seem
part of the strange customs of a fusty-dusty nevernever land. So our American playwright turns, instead, to the purifications effected nearer home. He
looks apprehensively into the matter of the movies. As an occasional scenario writer, he has been instructed by bulletins sent out for his guidance, little watch-your-step leaflets which list the alterations
ordered in earlier pictures by the august Motion

156
NONSENSEORSHIP
Picture Commission of the State of
New
York.
Most
of
them are fussy

in the titles.
little
disapprovals of lan-
say: "I shall kill Lester Crope." Better say: "I shall destroy the false Lester Crope" or something like that. You
guage used
You mustn't
mustn't say "roue." You mustn't say: "I don't like that rich old roue hanging around you." Better say: "I don't like that rich old sport." And when,
in
moment
of
self-indulgence,
title-writer
allowed himself the luxury of writing "In a moment of madness, I wronged a woman," the Censor seems
to have turned scarlet
order:
"Substitute
and issued the following for 'wronged' the word
'offended' or something similar."
"Or something
similar."
Somehow, that seems
to recall an old "Spanish for Beginners" textbook which bade me not bother with the "tutoyer" busi-
ness as
it
would not be needed during
my
travels
in Spain, unless I
married there "or something
similar."
At all events, no playwright can be scoffed at as an alarmist who ventures to fear that a censorship
of the
drama
will, in practice,
be
foolish.
At
the
thought of such frivolous and fatuous blue-pencillings of his next drama (which is to be his master-
our playwright becomes and every time he goes out to profoundly depressed
piece,
by
the
way)
157
NONSENSEORSHIP
dinner or finds himself with a small, cornered audience at the club, he winds up the talk on this buga-
boo of
his.
of the resulting prattle, two widespread impressions always come to the top, two familiar com-
Out
ments on the subject which, whenever questionable plays are mentioned, seem to emerge as regularly
and as automatically as does the applause which follows the rendition of Dixie by any restaurant Both comments are orchestra in New York.
absurd.
One comes from

to say:
the
man who
can be counted on
"They
it
tell
me
that show at the Eltinge
What's
all
called?
well, they say it's
'Tickling Tottie's Tummy?' pretty raw. Certainly does beat
how
there are some
men who
it's
just have to see a
show soon's they hear

stand
it."
smutty. I can't under-
This might be called the Comment Ingenuous. man who never fails to edge into any group whence the bent head and the hoarse chuckle tells
him that a shady story

to think hard to
is
on, a
name a
man who would have friend of his to whom he

such a
would not rush with the

brought
in
latest scandalous anecdote
by the drummers from Utica
man
when
will,
nevertheless, express a pious surprise
the crowds flock to see the latest

158
Hopwood
NONSENSEORSHIP
farce just because
is
it is is
advertised as indecorous. It
surprised.
falls
not
Or,
known why he
if
he
is
not surprised, then he
over back-
ward and makes the Comment Cynical. When he hears that "Under Betty's Bolster" is making a fortune while "The Grey Iconoclast" is playing to
empty benches next door, he
gives a sardonic
little
laugh (which he reserves for just such occasions) and says: "Of course. You might have known. Old
Channing Pollock was right when he said: 'Nothing risque, nothing gained.' Don't the smutty shows always make money? Doesn't the public invariably stampede to the most bedridden plays? Isn't the pornographic play the most valuable of
all theatrical
properties?"
To which
case, as it
rhetorical questions, the

is
answer in each
is
happens,
is is
"No." The blush
not, of
course, a
bad sign
in the box-office.
But the chuckle

is
of recognition sentiment. So
a better one.
So
the glow of
the tear of sympathy. The smutty and the scandalous have a smaller and less active
market than homely humor, for instance, or melodramatic excitement or pretty sentiment. "Aphrodite" was brought here from Paris,
When
it
was,
for various reasons, impossible to recapture for the translated dramatization the flavor of abnormal
eroticism which lent the book a certain phosphor159
NONSENSEORSHIP
escent glow at home. So its producers relied on lots and lots of nudity to give it reclame here. At this the Hearst papers did some rather pointed blushing
and the next morning, there was a grand scrimmage at the box-office and seats were hawked about for
grotesque prices. Whereupon the Comment Cynical could be heard on all sides. But when at the end
drawn with a shortage
of the season or so later, "Aphrodite" was withof a hundred and ninety

its
books, the Cynics were too engrossed with some other play to mention the fact. To be sure that shortage was more than made
thousand dollars or so on
up next season on
the road, but
it
ought to be men-
knew the indignity of many and many an empty row in New York. The great fortunes, as a matter of fact, are made with plays like "Peg o' My Heart" and "The First
tioned that "Aphrodite"
Year," both as pure as the driven snow. It is true that Avery Hopwood has grown rich on his royalties. But not so rich as Winchell Smith, who has
dealt exclusively with sweetness and light. Also those who laugh most caustically over the Hopwood*
estate usually find it convenient to ignore the fact that the greatest single contribution to it has been made by "The Bat," at which Dr. Straton might
conceivably faint from excitement but at which he
would have to work pretty hard to do any blushing.

160
NONSENSEORSHIP
So much
validity.
for the familiar catch- words

little
and
their
discouraged by the fatuity of all lay discussion, our playwright may be pictured as retreating to the clubrooms of the American
Dramatists and there finding

all
his fellow-craftsmen
on scenarios overflowing with not particularly original sin. They are turning them out hurriedly with an "After-me-the-deluge" gleam in their haunted eyes. Some such despairing courtship of disaster may be needed to explain the jostling procession of harlots which marked the
busy as bees
American Drama
in the season of 1921-1922.
An
unprecedentedly large percentage of the heroines had either just been ruined (or were just about to
be ruined) as the first curtain rose. Also the plays wallowed in a defiant squalor of language which,
five years before,
would have
called out the reserves.
privilege to indulge in such didos is not, as a matter of fact, especially dear to them. They
The
do not really prize unduly the right to use the word "slut" once in every act. They can even bear up
whenever a law forbids disrobing on the stage. They know that most pruriency in the theatre derives from the old frustrations sealed up and festering in the mind of the onlooker who detects it. suspect, from what little reading they have
They
man
more
aged
in the psychology of outlets, that the

161
NONSENSEORSHIP
mock-raping there
done on the stage of the local opera house, the less real raping will be done on
is
the greensward of the nearest park. But they know, too, that the force of modesty is one of the
strongest and most ancient instincts of civilized man, that probably it is a sound and healthy one, inextricably involved in the race's instinct of self-
preservation and self -perpetuation. Anyway, they feel that the discussion draws them into matters unarguable.
They dread a Censor most for fear his appetite will grow by what it feeds on. They know that the Lord Chamberlain began by exorcising obscenity
from the English theatre and ended by
banning so fiercely Puritanical a play as "Mrs. Warren's Profession" because it admitted the existence of brothel-keeping as a business
and by
as
shutting
the
up such innocent merriment

its
"The
Mikado" because
jocularity might offend the (at

derive a cer-
moment) dear Japanese.
Most American playwrights would

tain
in
enjoyment from watching a posse of citizens wrathful pursuit of one of those theatrical man-
agers who are big brothers to the trembling crones that totter up to you on the Boulevard des Italiens
and try to sell you a few obscene postal-cards. But most American playwrights would feel a genuine
162
NONSENSEORSHIP
apprehension
values and
its
lest
such a posse, confused in its mission, might then turn and lock
up Eugene O'Neill because of the rough talk that lends veracity to "The Hairy Ape" or because of
the steady scrutiny which has the effect of stripping naked the unhappy creatures of his play called
"Diff'rent."
perfectly willing to co-operate with a State official appointed to prevent the use
They would be
of naughty words on the American stage, but they darkly suspect that he would then require every
heroine to bring a letter from her pastor and would
end by interfering with

for instance, that
all
plays which suggested,
government had been known,
from time to time, to prove corrupt, wealth to become oppressive and law, on rare occasions, to seem just a wee bit unjust. They are minded to resist
any supervision of the theatre's manners for fear Toit might shackle in time the theatre's thought. day or tomorrow they may be seen temporizing or
at least negotiating with the forces of suppression
in
any community, but they are
really seeking all
the time to frustrate those forces.
And will
so seek
ever and always, law or no law. It was just such frustration they were seeking when after a season
of ruined heroines
all
(and ruined managers)

in April, 1922,
163
they
gravely sat
down
and drew up
NONSENSEORSHIP
a panel of 300 pure-minded citizens from which a jury could be called to pass on any play complained of.
they have the comfort of knowing that any such supervision, today or tomorrow, legalized or
And
roundabout, mild or incessant,
is
bound
to be super-
ficial, spasmodic and largely formal. They know that in the long run the theatre in each day and community, will manage somehow to express the
taste of that
it is
day and community. They know that
the sweet revenges of life that the o'erleaping censor always defeats himself. They derive a curious comfort from the story of
among
the reviewer for a Boston journal who once described a musician as remaining seated through a
concert in the pensive attitude of Buddha contemplating his navel. It is a story within whose
implications
will
lies all
that has ever been said, or ever
about censorship. The copy-readers and make-up men, it seems, could see nothing especially infamous in their reviewer's little simile. As
be
said,
poor George Sampson said of the outraged Mrs.

Wilfer's under-petticoat: "We know it's there." At all events, the offending word passed all the
sentries
and was printed as written, when, too
late,
it caught the horrified eye of the proprietor. At the sight of so crassly physical a term in the chaste
164
NONSENSEORSHIP
columns of
editor.
his
own
phone at the club
paper, he rushed to the teleand called up the managing
That word must come out. But the paper was already on the presses. Even as they spoke,
these were whirling out copy after copy. late to reset? Yes, much too late. But there not
still
Too
was
some remedy which would keep at

from that dreadful
it still
least part of the edition free
possible to rout out the type at that point, to chisel the word away and leave a
word? Wasn't
blank?
Yes, that was possible. So the presses were halted, the one word was scraped out, the presses whirred again and the review, with a gape
in the line,
went up and down Beacon Street. Whereat Boston that night shook with a mighty
laughter
generate.
the
contented
laughter
of
the
unre-
165
THE ORACLE THAT ALWAYS

SAYS "NO"
THE AUTHOR or "THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON"
ever stopped to think what the nonsensorship would do to our suppressed desires? little while ago suppressed desires were one's own
affair.
HAS anyone
One fondled them
in the skeleton closet of
his consciousness
and was as proud of them

is
as any-
one with a haunted house

interest in a ghost.
of his right,
title
and
They proved to him that though he went to church on Sunday and was respectably married to only one woman, he was really beneath his correct
exterior a whale of a fellow,
who might have
been,
had he but
Byron.
unruly
got
it
let
He
himself go, a Casanova or at least a patted himself on the back for keeping
He applauded himself for what he might be and for what he was. He

instincts in subjection.
coming and going. It was a pleasant age.
But now is he permitted to have his own secret museum of virility? I speak only of the sex which
has
my deepest
sympathy.
166
f>
IT?
THE PERISCOPE OF THE AUTHOR OF THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON TURNED TOWARD THE GREAT NEGATIVE ORACLE
IS
NONSENSEORSHIP
No.
picion.
The nonsensorship regards him with

lies
sus-
He must go and have even that part of him

below the level of his consciousness
which
dragged forth by experts in the interests of society, and if there is anything hidden in him which might not be exhibited on the movie screens, he
must have
it
sublimated.
He
cannot even have
suppressed desires. low even to himself.
He cannot be a devil of a felHe cannot be his own censor
any longer, he must submit himself to outside censoring, to the nonsenseorship.
came about this way. First to establish divine right somewhere in modern government, the doctrine was set up that the public mind was inIt all
fallible.
Thereafter, naturally, attention centered on the public mind. What was it that it had this
wonderful quality of always being right? Experience showed that it was not a thinking mind. Since
it
was
not, then the thinking
Then our very
best
some French ones, developed a system which set forth that reason always led you into traps and that the only mind to trust was the irrational, instinctive or intuitional
mind was anti-social. American philosophers, and for the support of mass opinion,
Thus the nonsenseorship, with philosophic support put the ban upon Now, I do not contend that many suffer
mind.
167
excellent
thinking.
seriously
NONSENSEORSHIP
from
this restriction.
hard work and
may
For, after all, thinking is cheerfully be foregone in the

its
general interest. But does the nonsenseorship rest content with
achievement?
important, let
If the instinctive part of us is so us have a look at it, says society;
perhaps something anti-social may be unearthed there. Viennese explores this area of the mind.
forbid, merely hidden away. Civilization has merely pressed it into dark corners, as the law has crowded the black-
He
discovers
what
society
would
jack artist into alleys and dens of thieves. The psychic police are put on our trail. They must nab
every suppressed desire and send it to the reform school for re-education into something beautiful
We may not be unhappy, neurotic, mad; our complexes must be inspected. We must
and
serviceable.
suppress our reason,

sire;
its
we may
not suppress our de-
the nonsenseorship says so, and to persuade us, experts offer us the reward of health and greater
if
usefulness
we make
this further surrender.
Now, although
as I have said
we
let
reason go at
the behest of the nonsenseorship without so much as a word of protest, we do not give up our suppressed
desires so easily and without a fight. As a result we see the nonsenseorship in a
light.
new
be-
We
feel it
more keenly now than ever

168
NONSENSEORSHIP
fore.
It
is
revealed as the Procrustean bed which

until
cramps us up
we ache
if
inside.
If there
is
any-
thing the matter with us,
we
are introverted, in-
trospective, neurotic, complicated,
have too much
ego, are dyspeptic, sick, sore, inhibited, regressive, defeated or too successful, unlittle
ego or too
happy, cruel or too kind,
if
we differ ever
so slightly
from the enforced average, it is because censorship presses upon us. And the cure for censorship is more censorship. Have your psychic insides censored; if you would be a perfect 36 mentally and
morally, with the Hart, Schaffner & Marxed soul which modern society wills that you shall have, con-
form not only without but within, and be "splendidly null"! I think it is the sudden realization that just a little more of individuality, our hidden individuality, is threatened, which makes the nonsenseorship irk us now as it never did before. The race has always had it, but in the beginning
it
was a crude and simple
thing, troubling itself
woman whose official duty; only with externals. it is to look after the virtue of the movies in Pennsylvania or Ohio, will not permit on the screen any; suggestion that there is a physiological relation between a mother and a child. This method of protecting the race has its roots back in the primitive mind of mankind. When men really did not un-
derstand
how
children
came about,
169
birth$
were
NONSENSEORSHIP
woman at a certain moment had catastrophic. to disappear into the wilderness; she came back
having found a baby under a cabbage
contact with her while she was
leaf.
Any;
making her discovery; might bring pestilence and death to the tribe. still believe in the pestilence even if we no
We
longer have faith in the cabbage leaf. The lady censor of Ohio or Pennsylvania is the tribe driving
the pregnant woman into the wilderness. On the whole the tribe did it better than we do it only removed the offender and the mental life of the little
;
community went on just as before. We keep the offender amongst us and close our minds. Our simple ancestors covered no more with the fig leaf than they thought it necessary to hide; we wear the
the nonsenseorship. Mr. Griffith recently brought out a cinema spectacle called "Orphans in the Storm," which preis
fig leaf over
our eyes: that
French Revolution. Now it was not long ago that we Americans were all rather proud of the French Revolution. We had a revolution of our own and we thought had with satisfaction that the French had caught theirs from us. We were as pleased about it as the little
sented
many
scenes from the
boy
is
when
mumps
the neighbor's little boy catches the from him. He sees an enlargement of his
ego in the swollen neck of his playmate. All that is changed now. Mr. Griffith picturing
170
NONSENSEORSHIP
the triumphant
mob
in Paris
had to
fill
his screens
with preachments against Bolshevism, which had as much to do with his subject as captions about the
rape of the Sabine woman would have had to do with it. It is as if the little boy had been taught to
by never saying the word mumps, he could save his playmate from tumefying glands. Soon some committee of morons which attends to the keeping of our intellects on the level with their own will exclude from the schools all histories which contain the words "the American Revolution." We must call it the War for American Independence. That is putting the fig leaf over our eyes. That is the nonsenseorship.
believe that
But
before
we
decide whether or not
we
shall re-
fuse to yield
up our suppressed desires as we have surrendered our reason to it, with the approval of
our leading philosopher, Mr. William James, let us consider some of the advantages of the nonsenseorship.
Perhaps
is
it
will
prove worth while to give
up
this little internal privilege.
the simplicity of consulting the socalled public mind. The favorite aphorism of the politician and his friend and spokesman the editor
is:
First there
politician or the propagandist can present a question to the people in such

171
"The public is always This means that if the
right
upon a moral
issue."
NONSENSEORSHIP
a
way
if
that he can
win
his
end by having the public

is
respond in the negative, he

as
society
sure of success.
It
is
guidance upon the word of an oracle, a great stone image, out of which the priests had only succeeded in producing one
its
depended for
response, a sound very much like, "No." The trick would consist of so framing your question that the word "no" would give you approval for your designs. That is the art of laying before the public a "moral issue" upon which it is inevitably right. Suppose, in a society ruled by the stone image, you wanted to make war upon your neighbor. You
would frame your question thus: "Shall we stand by idly and pusillanimously while our neighbor invades our land and rapes our women?" This is a
moral issue of the deepest sanctity. You would present it. The priests would do their little something somewhere out of sight. From the great stone image would come a bellow which resembled
"No." You would have won on a moral issue and would then be licensed to invade your neighbor's territory and rape his women.
you will perceive certain advantages in an oracle which can only say one word. You know in advance what its answer will be. Suppose the great
stone image could have said either "yes" or "no." Suppose its answer had been "yes" to your right172
Now
NONSENSEORSHIP
eous question? It would have been embarrassing. You could no longer say with such perfect confidence, "It is always right upon a moral issue."
Suppose you were capital and you desired to reduce wages. You would not go to the temple and say, "Shall we reduce wages?" That would not be a moral issue upon which the answer would be right. You would ask, "Shall we tamely acquiesce while the labor unions import the Russian revolution into our very midst?" The great stone voice always to be trusted on moral issues would thunder,
"No."
;
Or suppose you were labor

handed
for
my oracle is even-
and you wished to extend your organization you would go to the temple and propound the inquiry, "Shall we be eaten alive by the war profiteers ?" The always moral voice would at least whisper "No."
It will be observed that in consulting the oracle whose answer is known in advance, the only skill
required consists in so framing the question that you will get a louder roar of "no" than the other
If you can always do this you can say with perfect confidence that old granite lungs "is always right upon a moral issue."
side
can with
its
question.
That
is
Would
the art of being a great popular leader. anyone exchange a voice like that as a
173
NONSENSEORSHIP
ruler for the
wisdom of the world's ten wisest men?

Greeks for
their practice of con-
yVe laugh
at the
sulting the oracle at Delphi and rightly, for our oracle beats theirs which used to hedge in its an-
swers and leave them in doubt.

cates;
lic
Ours never equivo-
we know
is
mind
answer beforehand, for the pubcompounded of prejudices, fears, herd

its
instincts,
youthful hatred of novelty,
all
easily
calculable.
It has been
my
public opinion is more or less unconscious, has been to say to myself, "The public is made up largely of the unthinking.
duty for many years to tell what on many subjects. My method,
Such and such misinformation has been presented to it. Such and such prejudices and fears have
been aroused.
Its answer
is is
The
result
is
so
and
so."
It
invariably negative. thus that judges of
They do not public opinion invariably proceed. find the popular will reflected in the newspapers. They know
such a mind
it
as a chemist
knows a
reaction,
from
least
familiarity with the elements combined.

is
At
And
highly convenient. after all who does make the best censor, or
nonsenseor or whatever you choose to call it? Was it not written, "The child is censor to the man?"
Well, if it was not it ought to have been, and it is now. Consider the child as it arrives in the family.
174
NONSENSEORSHIP
Forthwith there
which
may
not merely the One Subject never be mentioned. There are a hundis
red subjects. guard ears must be kept pure.
is
upon
the
lips.
The
little
Now, when we set up the establishment of democracy we did take a child into our household.
I have discussed elsewhere* the parentage of this infant born of Rousseau and Therese, his moron mistress. The public mind is a child mind because
in the first place the
mob mind
of
men
is
primitive,
youthful and undeveloped, and again because by the wide diffusion of primary instruction, we have
number of persons with less than adult mentality who contribute to the forming
steadily increased the
of public opinion. In the nature of the case, fifty per cent, of the public must be sub-normal, that is,
have reached down to the youthful mentality. That is why we level of nonsense for our guide.
call it in this
We
book the nonsenseorship. Every one who has watched the growth of a
child's
vocabulary has observed that it learns to say "no," many months, perhaps more than a year, before it ever says "yes." An infant which took to
saying "yes" before
it
did "no" would violate
all
precedents, would scandalize its parents, and would grow up to be a revolutionist. It would have an
*
Chapter V.
Behind
the Mirrors.
175
NONSENSEORSHIP
attitude toward life with which
men
should not be
born and which parents and society would find subOn the instinct for saying "no" rests all versive.
our institutions, from the family to the state. It should exhibit itself early and become a confirmed
" habit before the dangerous "y es emerges. Besides, the child needs to say "no" long before
needs to say "yes." Foolish parents feed ifmentally as they feed it physically, out of a bottle. If
it
had not its automatic facility of regurgitation, both mental and physical, it would suffer from excesses. Its "no" is its mental throwing up.
it
tal regurgitative stage.
The public mind is still in the no-saying, the menBut is not that ideal for the nonsenseorship ? Does a censor ever have need
word but "no"?
I have
of any other
oracle
now established the convenience of an whose answer "no" can always be foreseen;
fitness of the child
for saying "no," as well as the perfect adaptation of the single word vocabulary to the purposes of the nonsenseorship.
and the
mind
One
serves
is
of the important ends which a "no" always all cling maintaining the status quo.
precariously to a whirling planet. for fear of somehow being spilled off into space. The nonsenseorship of the child mind is splendidly
conservative.
We We hate change
The baby
in the habit of receiving
176
NONSENSEORSHIP
its bottle
take
it
from its nurse will go hungry rather than from its mother or father. Gilbert was
wrong.
little
Every
child
is
not born a
little
radical or a
conservative.
Reaching down for the child mind in society, with some misgivings, we have been delighted to find it
the
making for stability. An amusing thing happened when Mr. Hearst some
strongest
force
years ago sought readers in a lower level of intelligence than any journalist had till then explored. To interest the child mind he employed the old device of pictures, his favorite illustration portraying
the Plunderbund.
Now, persons who thought
the
cartoon of the Plunderbund looked like themselves,
viewed the experiment with alarm. But Mr. Hearst was right. He proved to be as he said he
was, "our greatest conservative force." The surest guardians of our morals and of our social order are
precisely
Mr. Hearst's
alphabet spelling out
readers, who learned the P-L-U-N-D-E-R-B-U-N-D.

in
They watch keenly and with reprobation
Mr.
"Is
Hearst's press our slightest divagations. De Gourmont, writing of education, asks:

it
necessary to cultivate at such pains in the
minds
of the young, hatred of what is new?" And he says it is done only because the teacher naturally hates everything that has come into the world since
177
NONSENSEORSHIP
he won
taken.
his diploma.
It
is
But no; De Gourmont is misbecause we teach the young what it is

having re-
socially beneficial that they should learn,
gard also for their aversion to novelty, to the bottle from any other than the accustomed hands.
And we
education
find in the child
mind
and
foster
it
by
"the will to believe," that great American virtue. It requires an immense "will to believe" to
grow up
in the family
and
in society, look-
ing at the elders and at all that is established, and accepting all the information that mankind has
slowly accumulated and which teachers patiently offer. If the young once doubted, once thought but unfortunately they do not! Anyway, we do
find in the child mind, which forms the nonsenseorship,
the
"will
to
believe,"
of immense
social
utility.
Now,
cay
if
the "will to believe"
like teeth
which de-
not used upon hard food, or muscles which grow flabby if they have not hard work to perform must be given something for its proper exercise.
In a chapter on "The Duty of Lying," in his brilliant book Disenchantment,, Mr. C. E. Montague shows what may be done with "the will to
believe," developed as
the
"During war the art of Propaganda was little more than born." In the next war, "the whole sky would be
it
has at last been.
178
NONSENSEORSHIP
darkened with
the
flights of tactical lies, so
dense that
enemy would fight in a veritable 'fog of war' darker than London's own November brews, and the world would feel that not only the Angel of Death was abroad, but the Angel of Delusion too, and would hear the beating of two pairs of wings." And what may be done with the "will to believe" in time of war has immense lessons for the days of British Tommy, quoted by Mr. Montapeace. gue, summed the moral advantages up "They tell
me
we've pulled through at last
all
right because
our propergander dished up better lies than what the Germans did. So I say to myself: 'If tellin'
lies is all
is tellin'
it,
that bloody good in war, what bloody good " truth in peace?' What "bloody good" is
to
when you have ready
hand the well-trained

most serviceable
"will to believe,"
which those who censored reason
for its social disutility set up as the attribute of the human mind?
I think I have written enough to prove that the child mind at the bottom of nonsenseorship is the
effective base of stability.
But
the heart of
man
desires also
permanency.
Is there reasonable as-
surance that
we
shall
guiding principles of our national senseorship, a child mind?

It
is
always be able to keep the life, the nonas far down,
true that
we have reached
179
NONSENSEORSHIP
through our press and through our public men, to the levels of the low I. Q. as it is practicable to go, until we grant actual children and not merely mental children
an even larger share than they now

;
have in the forming of public opinion for this is, as you know, "the age of the child." And no great further advance is likely to be
made
of uniting the whole 100,000,000 people of this country in a 24-hour a

in the mechanical
means
day, 365 days a year, mass meeting. The cheap newspaper, the moving picture, instant telegraphic bulletin going everywhere, the broadcasting wireless telephone,
and the Ford car, have accomplished all that can be hoped toward giving the widelyscattered population the responsiveness of a mob.
But though perhaps we may never lower

I.
the
Q. of the nonsenseorship, no further triumphs being possible in that direction, there is no reason
why
call "creating an enshould not always mainlightened public opinion," tain for us the child mind as it now is with all its
education,
what we
manifold advantages.
Somewhere
in Bartlett there
is,
or ought to be, a
quotation which reads like this: "The god who always finds us young and always keeps us so." That is education; it always finds us young and
always keeps us
so.
180
NONSENSEORSHIP
It catches us
tive, storing
it
when our minds are merely
acquisi-
up impressions and information; and that period of acquisition to maturity by prolongs always throwing facts in our way. Its purpose is
not to "sow doubts," far from it, for that would have for its ideal mere intelligence and not social
usefulness.
lieve,"
dists,
and
It develops instead the "will to bethis serves the needs of the propagan-
who, as Mr. Will
H. Hayes
is
reported to
have said of the movies, "shake the rattle which

keeps the American child amused so that
its
it forgets aches and pains." trust edumay safely cation to keep the American mind infantile, merely
We
acquisitive
and not
critical.
And
thus the non-
senseorship seems sure to be perpetuated, and we reach the ideal of all the ages, society in its perma-
nent and final form.

rest.
Here we
are, here
we may
These considerations persuade me at least that we should make the utmost sacrifices for so perfect a social means as we now have. Let the nonsenseorship
invade
the
secret
closets
of
our
personality and
rummage
out our most cherished
suppressed desires. Let us have nothing that we may call our own. For my part, I shall spend the
proceeds qf this article upon one of the police, a psycho-analyst.
181
new
social
My
The
Northern Exposure
Kawa
at the
Pole
By
Walter E. Traprock
Similar in format to the famous Cruise of the
Kaioa, this
new volume carries the reader on an exciting and riotously funny expedition to the frozen north. It is an account of the adventures of the redoubtable Dr. Traprock (and
party) who set out to discover the real North Pole but undertake their voyage in a most
unusual manner. The incidents, accidents and

final discoveries in this
certain
to afford
as
merry burlesque are much, if, indeed, not

first
more enjoyment than the Fully illustrated from

photographs.
Kawa
story.
strikingly original
G. P. Putnam's Sons New York London
ROLLO
By
IN
SOCIETY
George
An
and
S.
Ghappell
up-to-date adaptation of the
Rollo Books, so
thereafter.
famous
in the fifties
Gorgeously funny
satire,
and worthwhile
is
too
this
book
a hilarious commentary on modern
society.
Illustrated
with 18 drawings by
Hogarth,
Jr.
G. P. Putnam's Sons New York London
There never was a book before quite

of Sheba."
like the
"Queen
It possesses the interest of authentic history, the lure of romance, the charm of masterful style. And
yet the delighted reader soon enough realizes that it is neither history, romance, nor literary biography, but in-
stead subtle satire.

It is the story, of course, of Balkis,
It is written
Queen
of Sheba.
by one blessed with the ability to write supplemented with an overwhelming sense of humor an author, who, for the present, has adopted the nom de plume of Phinneas A. Crutch. Some of the diary of Balkis will be happily familiar, in a
distorted fashion, to the readers of
Mar got.
Much
of the
biography
is
not,
to say the least, unreminiscent of
And then the so-nearly-authentic tale merges Strachey. into sea-going burlesque of "The Sheik." Satirical,
chuckling, notable literary humor,
all of it.
An
unusual cover from a

$2.50.
bas-relief.
In addition to
Jr.,
half-tone illustrations, line drawings
by John Held,
decorate every page.
G. P. Putnam's Sons 2 West 45th St., New York City
HOME
This book
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is
USE
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last date
stamped below.
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I

FREDERICK OBKIEN DOROTHY R\RKER FRANK SWINNERTON

HANSON TOWNE V. A. WEAVER 'ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

CONCERNING I PROHIBITIONS INHIBITIONS^ AND ILLEGALITIES

JfEW YORK AND LONDON

economic application of Nonsenseorship.

group of not-too-serious thinkers to

their views regarding nonsenseor ships in

none of notable puritanical proThe prohibitionists and censors are not

require, in a levititious literary

no spokesman. Their viewpoint amply set forth. Moreover, likely they

would not be amusing.

Also, the exponents of Nonsenseorship are victorious; and at least the

HEYWOOD BROUN agonized,

Indeed, masquerading as a stalwart foe of inhibitions, he starts right out, at the

very head of the parade, with a vehement advocacy

the animating inthirty, pre-

become as circumscribed and paterit,

nalized as the world inside

who have been

nonsenseorship long enough to have learned to

since the red light laws

author of "Simon Called Peter."

people with mental blinders.

declares that the

And then HELEN BULLITT LOWRY, the exponent

She maintains that the

mystic atolls and white shadows "Whack

gives vent to a poignant of Hate, anent reformers, who "think every-

thing but the Passion Play was written by

they do," adds the author

through the eyes of

ourselves as others see

In days gone by, lured

know what it is like to have by somebody who is not a woman."

man from a woman, though

imagined nation of the future

"as loyal and homoas stable, as a reef of

thousand quips) struggle with Prohibition, dourly surveying

of the grave." . . "as they sip their light

we are reminded he is also a bachelor. own American language JOHN WEAVER

Place" will bring

eyes to the unregenerate:

over at the free-lunch counter,

And washed down

with a seidel of Old Schlitz

WOOLLCOTT, who emerges

champion of stage morality, though no friend at

We Have With Us Today

Another of Those Outlines

and the Bastinado

HELEN BULLITT LOWRY

Guess at Unwritten History

CHARLES HANSON TOWNE

the Play wright

THE AUTHOR OF "THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON"

George Chappell demonstrating Censorship

America suffering from a dearth

Dorothy Parker hating Reformers

1922 - Nonsenseorship (Prohibition Satire & Ridicule)

1922 - Nonsenseorship (Prohibition Satire & Ridicule)

1922 - Nonsenseorship (Prohibition Satire & Ridicule)